Winter in Portland, ME - GeoDev Meetup
On Tuesday evening, the developer community gathered together at Cloudport and shared a great evening with the Esri R&D Center team in Portland, ME. With the goal of having the R&D Center meetups quarterly, we came from hosting our previous meetup in fall, so this was a great time to reconnect and see what everyone was working on at the close of the year.
We had a great representation from the Esri R&D Center: Jeff Jackson, Annie Jackson, Brent Pierce, Joel Whitney, Aaron Pulver, Noah Sager, Dawit Elias, and Heather McCracken. With so many of the team present, this allowed for the attendees to ask questions about the R&D Center and also any ideas they had to share.
Cloudport proved to be such a great venue during our fall quarter meetup that we ventured to host it there again. It didn't fail. The space was conducive to enabling the community to gather outside of the presentation area, lean against the tall boy tables, and share a nice appetizer and beverage. After the happy hour, it was time to get started!
Brent Pierce emceed the event and welcomed everyone to another productive meetup. He introduced a few new developer-driven projects and efforts: DevLabs, DevSummit, SDKs/APIs, and GeoDev Meetups and Webinars. With that, he introduced our speakers:
- Joel Whitney, "Dynamic Symbology with Arcade"
Arcade is a new expression-based scripting language for controlling how features and labels are rendered using feature attributes and logical operators. Joel gave a demo showing how it can be fairly simple to use, and the results are consumable across the ArcGIS platform.
- Jeff Jackson, "Taking Maps Offline - A Prototype"
For mobile applications, how an app performs with limited connectivity (or none altogether) is an essential part of its functional design. Jeff gave a demo showing how vector tile basemaps can be clipped out and packaged for offline use.
- Aaron Pulver, "Operations Dashboard - 1.0 Release"
Operations Dashboard uses maps and charts to provide managers the status of their projects in the field in real time. Aaron gave a demo showing how it can be configured and put to use quickly and easily.
- Aaron Pulver, "Python API Jupyter Notebook"
Jupyter Notebooks are a fast growing popular way to author and share documents that contain Python code, interactive widgets and components, graphs, images, video, and narrative text, presenting projects and results in a natural way. Aaron gave a demo showing some basic things you can do with the ArcGIS API for Python in a notebook, specifically, going from a downloaded raw CSV file and ending up with a fully published web map.
Trivia was interwoven into the meetup, where we had a hot debate on whether there were two or three state planes in Maine (turns out two), and only one person was able to answer what Maine should start bracing themselves to see more of off of the coast....you know what? I'll let you guess what that might be in the comments below. How about that?
Lastly, we were able to congratulate Ted Chapin, GIS Developer of SGC Engineering, LLC on his giveaway to the DevSummit in Palm Springs. Ted is a many time attender to the DevSummit, so we were very proud to be able to hand him a complimentary registration. We'll see you there, Ted!
Stay tuned for our next GeoDev Meetup where we're heading to NYC at the Heartland Brewery and Chophouse on 12/12! We're very excited and looking forward to a great lineup of more lightning talks and making more developer connections within the New York area.
Until then, develop on!
