…aaand I’m back home.
So I’ve been to a lot of conferences. Some Good. Some Bad. This one was good. Better than I had hoped. So what was my main takeaway from it?
They keynotes were a great contrast of people/computers. OSM is all about the people. I had no clue how active OSM US has become. The things they are doing caught me completely off guard. I used to keep up more with OSM in general and while I do a lot of mapping – I don’t necessarily follow the tech.
I found the ESRI keynote fascinating because it was AI. Let your computer help you get to an answer. I do need to pay attention more to AI because it’s the topic of conversation everywhere. Especially at this meeting. I usually just tune out during an ESRI keynote – but this one held my attention. I’m still not completely sold this isn’t all a bubble though.
I’m a barely passable programmer. I make notes everywhere. There are things I do with shell scripts. There are SQL scripts I write. I probably sit in VIM more than I care to admit. I try to do things in Python. Mainly for me programming is just a “thing” I do to fix the problem at hand. On more than one occasion at this meeting people were telling me they were using AI to fix python scripts that were written for Python 2.7 to get them into Python 3.x. More people told me they were “vibe coding” – which basically you use AI to build out most of what you need to do than then add in what’s left. I used AI to design a leaflet map a few months back. I do wonder how many people are relying on AI to do it all. There has been a pretty good discussion in the QGIS developers list on AI written contributions going into the source code of QGIS. Short answer – None. It does make me wonder how many plugins are taking the AI approach. It also makes me wonder how many commercial products have AI code going into them. What happens when it implodes?
Also – I won a thing. It’s a terrible picture. Taking a pic of Glass is harder than I need it to be.
I hate surprises. This award goes out to people who have made a difference in the GEO FIeld in Tennessee. I am grateful for the recognition – it did leave me wondering what difference I had actually made. That’s been a huge question for me this year after the whole episode of last year. Life is short and what is next for myselfand NRGS. Probably a bit of retooling and some pivoting. The industry is changing.
With that – The next conference is about a year from now in Franklin TN.
