Spatial analysis with PostgreSQL and OpenStreetMap
I've always been a map geek, dating back to the 1980s when I would take a road atlas and some tracing paper and draw in my own road network. And one of my favorite games is to take an old map or globe and try to determine when it was made based on the names and shapes of countries. In the age of online mapping software, big data, and data science, it gets even more interesting. Now I can download the whole data set for the map and write programs against it!
January 8, 2018
Resolution: Talk to Users in 2018
It’s the end of the year and you’re thinking:
“I did a pretty good job this year. I launched several new high-profile initiatives. Thousands more customers are using the application. I didn’t break anything (that couldn’t be fixed). Man, this year was so busy! Who’s got time to talk to users?”
You do. Make time.
December 27, 2017
The Four Quadrants of IoT Revenue Streams
The next decade will bring a society-changing transformation to smart, connected things throughout our personal, professional, and public lives. Everything about this change is big: the security risks are big, the improvements are big, and the scale is big. This change is a prime space to find new revenue opportunities for every product and service business.
December 23, 2017
How wasted inventory shows up in software development
In software, a feature backlog is no different than a warehouse of slowly rotting, unused goods. When you think of software features, think of inventory that is wasting away unless it is delivered to a customer.
December 16, 2017
The 3 Paths for Digital Transformation
There's a lot of talk about digital transformation these days. I think undoubtably this movement - transforming as many processes from analog to digital - is going to be the heart of value for business for at least the next 50 years into the future. That said, there three major ways for companies to "go digital":
December 12, 2017
Turning Your UI Into a Well Organized Symphony With Conductor
User interfaces have evolved over time. However, the archetypal approach to creating great user interfaces on Android™ has not. The first party tools available to all Android developers for crafting elegant user interfaces are Activities, Fragments, and Views. For the sake of this article, we will define a custom View to be a class that extends the View class and handles the actions of the user interface component.
December 11, 2017
Sluggish Drupal 8 Adoption Lags Even D6
We're just past the second anniversary of 8.0.0. To see how D8 is doing compared to prior releases, we put together the chart above, based on Drupal's usage stats page.
For versions 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x, each new release brought dramatically accelerated growth.
Comparatively, D8 has dropped off a cliff. Adoption is far below that of D7, and even behind D6.
December 11, 2017
There are no estimates, only budgets
The challenge of estimating software projects is that software is a creative act: you can paint a line, or you can paint a Monet. Every person involved has a different opinion about the amount of creativity needed for every miniscule feature.
December 8, 2017
Data Warehousing With Snowflake
I recently had a chance to work on a data warehousing project for a client that wanted a centralized data repository of data from a number of analytics providers to run reports against for business intelligence purposes. For this project the client chose to work with Snowflake a cloud data warehouse. In this blog post I’m going to discuss an overview of what Snowflake is, how it works, and talk a bit about some of the data loaders that I built to facilitate loading analytics data into the data…
December 6, 2017
Creating a Twitter ticker with a Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi is great if you want a dedicated device for a task that you can turn on, get it to do its thing and leave it alone. Recently, I wanted to set up a little LCD screen that would continuously print out the latest tweets from a particular account. With a few components and some Python libraries, it was easy to put together something that I could just plug in and leave running. Here's how you can did it too - if you just want the final code, get it here.
November 28, 2017