Greg Miller, writing for Wired Magazine, in a portrait of Cynthia Brewer, of Colorbrewer fame:
Brewer’s influence on cartography is far-ranging. Others have imitated her approach, developing a TypeBrewer and a Map Symbol Brewer. She’s seen her color schemes in everything from financial charts to brain imaging studies.
It’s a portrait in one of the most renowned technology publications of a university professor working on a rather niche subject — goes to show how much influence Brewer’s work has on our craft.
Jacob Hall wrote a recap about how he mapped his campus at William & Mary:
The most rewarding part of this project was getting to engage with community members in and around campus that I otherwise would have never met.
One of the positive effects of going out and mapping an area, especially when done with such determination, is that you get to know your neighbourhood and its community in intricate detail. At the moment, there is probably no other person in the world who knows more about the William & Mary university campus than Jacob Hall.
Bill Dollins reflects on the value of industry standards after working with proprietary product APIs:
In the geospatial field, the work of OGC gives us a bit more shared understanding. Because of the Simple Features Specification, we have GeoJSON, GML, GeoPackage, and various similar implementations across multiple open-source and proprietary database systems and data warehouses. Each of those implementations has benefits and shortcomings, but their common root shortens the time to productivity with each. The same can be said of interfaces, such as WxS. I have often been critical of WxS, but, for all the inefficiencies across the various specs, they do provide a level of predictability across implementing technologies which frees a developer to focus on higher-level issues.
OGC’s W*S specifications (e.g., WMS, WFS, or WCS) share similar features. Each provides a getCapabilities operation advertising the service’s — well — capabilities and operations to access the service’s items (getMap, getFeature, or getCoverage). The precise parameters required to execute the requests do vary, and so do server responses, but a good understanding of one specification can be transferred to other similar specifications.
The same flexibility and predictability in built into newer standards today, like OGC API - Features, and community specifications like STAC — both share the same foundation. OGC’s processes may be slow, and the specifications may not make for an entertaining read but its diligent process leads to predictable API design, enabling service and client developers to implement applications consistently and predictably.
You appreciate that more once you had the pleasure to build a service against the Salesforce API.
Saman Bemel Benrud, previously a designer at Mapbox, reflects on his time at the company. It’s a tale of what happens when a company accepts big VC money. The priorities shift from solving relevant problems to making money.
Even if you’re a lowly designer or engineer, you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable. It very likely is different from what they’re doing now, and may come with unexpected ethical compromises.
What other choices do companies have when they build geo-data products and compete with Google? Maybe they can grow slower, don’t sell solutions that aren’t yet available, involve employees in decisions, or accept and support unionisation efforts. The company still has to make money, but it might feel different to the people building the product. There must be a way to build a sustainable business that doesn’t involve VC funding.
Tom MacWright explores whether newer geo-data formats, like FlatGeobuf, Zarr, GeoParquet, Arrow, or COGs, are useful for applications making frequent updates to the data.
The post dives deep into some of the characteristics of these data formats, including compression, random access, and random writes, and concludes that they are optimised for reading data and that the benefits for writes are limited:
I like these new formats and I’ll support them, but do they benefit a usecase like Placemark ? If you’re on the web, and have data that you expect to update pretty often, are there wins to be had with new geospatial formats? I’m not sure.