Posts

I gave a talk at FOSS4GNA 2026 in Sacramento that demonstrated how to build a vector tile delivery API using DuckDB, GeoParquet, and Azure Storage+Functions. It is entirely serverless in its architecture and cloud native in its data approach. The talk outlined how to build a vector tile delivery API... [Read More]

Throughout most of my career, I worked alone on complex problems. I excelled at working independently and it remains my preferred approach to this day. It comes with little surprise that I am much stronger working on my own than in sprawling teams. Starting around 2020, I had to begrudgingly... [Read More]

I tell people that I am a software developer, but that’s not what I really do. I’m a problem solver that sometimes has to use code to solve problems I am faced with. When I was only a few years into my career, my boss once referred to me as... [Read More]

My college years were spent studying rocks. While earning a degree in Geology, I was occupied with courses in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. These foundational sciences provided the context to begin to understand larger systems like climate, glaciology, and hydrogeology. I learned to deconstruct and explain outcomes by reducing them... [Read More]

In the mid 1960’s, two scientists from Bell Labs named Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were trying to remove sources of interference in readings from a radio telescope to perform research. No matter what they did, a constant source of noise plagued their efforts. They went to great lengths in... [Read More]

I used to joke that my job was to continually make myself obsolete. In the current atmosphere of anxiety surrounding the threat posed by AI to job security, that old quip now sounds like an odd position to adopt. However, I think there’s a lesson to be learned. In spite... [Read More]

For this problem, there are 100 prisoners and 100 boxes in two separate rooms. Each box contains a slip of paper with a prisoners number in it. Each prisoner and box is numbered from one to 100. The numbers in the boxes are randomly shuffled. Each prisoner is then given... [Read More]

One task I have come across repeatedly while building APIs or functions that accept GeoJSON is dealing with differing representations. The input data may be a geometry, a feature, or a feature collection. When utilizing PostGIS as a backend, I inevitably run into errors after naively feeding input data directly... [Read More]