Introducing neaRThings

13 Mar 2015

On Names

So, I decided to start a blog and I picked a name - neaRThings, my succinct version of Tobler’s first law of geography, should reflect the domain I am passionate about - ‘geo’ and atleast, well, be intriguing enough.

Nowadays people don’t have time for verbose articles and I’m glad you’re on the third sentence already! My few professional years have led me to realise that tinkerers make things happen. I watched the Leaflet Mapping library grow from being just a speck on GitHub to the time it took on the Google Maps API. I also witnessed MapBox hire this Leaflet dude as I watched them evolve since I was following them closely because of TileMill.(Evolved to Mapbox Studio)

Tinkering gives one an edge, with contentment, without the restrain of structured seminars, classroom lessons or guided training. As a tinkerer I can quit when I want to (rarely) without feeling guilty about it. Research while troubleshooting, opens up (often unwanted) divergent paths from the task at hand and the tools, technologies and tutorials stumbled upon end up being appended to an ever growing ~ TODO!

Hencefrom

I learned about QGIS when it was still 0.7 (It’s at 2.8 at the date of writing this article), I was just about to leave varsity then, later ditched the prospects of becoming a Land Surveyor post graduation after having been made to wait the whole day by the would-be-mentor, only to be told to come back the next day. The first GIS related job was with an institution that had spreadsheets for a Land Information System - I was heart broken. This was nothing near what had been said in the interview and fell far short of what I had read from ArcUser Magazines at college. A few years later I met a mentor like no other, Johann Groenewald of Tracks4Africa. He led me on a teach-yourself path and gave me room to do it. I discovered QGIS again and PostGIS as well this time. Things have not been the same since.

(Aside: you may want to readup of T4A products and check out their Africa Map. Their business model still befuddles me. )

Along the way I discovered gis.stackexchange.com and jumped onto twitter. I was already faithfully following geobloggers amongst them James Fee - for starters, then the list grew to warrant the use of Feedly and not unparsable bookmarks in the browser. During my regular reading I bumbed into a statement that almost described my situation and led to serious introspection. It was by Paul Ramsey on his blog.

“…a career where 90% of the activity is actually in data creation (digitization monkey!) and publication (map monkey!), not in analysis…”

It was an eye opener regarding where I wanted to be professionally. Ever since I have been endeavouring to conform to the Spatial-IT padigm.I also took to heart the advice he gives in one of his presentations:

“Learn something new or hard. Learn something uncomfortable.”

And that was not the last on the matter as I kept coming across similar thought provoking and spurring tweets:

Well, I had left varsity thinking spatial was special!

Henceto

Direct thyself.

From the one and many blog posts I have read. I drew the conclusion - the best way to learn a technology, programming language or tool, is to be handson with it. Get to do some project with it. Thus the direction I am taking is to learn as much as I can through projects that come to my mind … light bulb moments.

Another Blog?

The day job doesn’t necessarily task me enough in the directions of the many tools and technologies out there. Sufficient for a day’s work are the tools in the office. For diversity I choose to waddle the “forest”. On this blog I intend to share my thoughts and experiences. Several posts on career development I’ve read up on recommend blogging for various reasons. I decided the following were relevant to me:

• Improve my writing skills. - I like poetry and ‘twisted’ english. So I will see how much of that can be used in technical writings. Metaphors say?

• Cement the things I learn. - By writing down procedures, that forces one to think about it, cementing the concepts in the head and hopefully birthing alternative approaches.

• Re-share what I have Read-up - rewrite what I would have learnt. Often I have used steps of ‘how-to’ from more than one blog post to get something right! Let others rediscover it. So I see no harm in having three pseudo-identical articles on the web.

What Tree?

Yes, I am using the Windows Operating system. I have had my stint with Linux, did 101 data recoveries from broken Windows. At one time I became an OS ethusiast, carrying around several distros on 3.5 inch floppy disks. I even damned the machines I was using daily, calling them Windoze.The revolutionalism got me nowhere! The food on my table and the railment I gait in, have been earned from spending atleast 8 hours a day using this operating system. Working against it doesn’t help but rather with it. Regardless, I can presently fire-off Ubuntu off my VirtualBox installation. To add to my consolation, one of the ‘geo’-bloggers I read after makes continued use shameless.

(Aside: At one point in my career I had to unistall Ubuntu from 30 PCs or so to install a Windows OS just because the adoption of OpenOffice and such just couldn’t happen. It was retrogressive to try and enforce it.)

In The Meantime

off to a project on GitHub for Geo - the thought “I need to learn JavaScript fast”, dogging my path after 2014 end of year geo-discussions, a turf call!

“ Parting Quote ”

@briantimoney, April 2012

Learning spatial SQL may not help getting a $45K job now, but is critical to getting a $85K job three years from now.

#postscript

The cost (gain) of the first post

It has been the ascent, albeit slow, of steep and slippery learning curves and unfamiliar terittory. There was serious tyre-kicking just to get the framework properly set-up - git, Ruby, ruby-gems… had to resort to using GitHub for Windows when SSH keys and things became a tangle while setting up git (command line).

Setting up Ruby was toughest, top-hit Google Search Octopress setup tutorials led me into infinite loops of troubleshooting. After weeks of trying, I had to do the whole Ruby setup ‘thing’ all over after finding this excellent and straight forward article on the matter. In a nutshell tools and apps that were used:

• Octopress - [Tool] Setting up, customising for font, but then git was a pre-requisite!
• GIT - [Technology] The tears and sweat of ensuring it installed and was working.
• Markdown - [Language] Learning the language. Luckily Cheatsheets made it easier.
• SublimeText - [Tool] Learning the Keyboard shortcuts. Searching for useful plugins. Must say OmniMarkupPreviewer did come in very handy while editing the blog post

Well, I must say the temptation to dump the Octopress path and go for WordPress (on Openshift) was great at one time but I prevailed. Tinkerers tinker until it works!