GeoDev Meetup in Portland, OR!
On Wednesday, November 29th, the Portland, Oregon R&D Center hosted another GeoDev Meetup, welcoming some 25 members from the local geographic developer community. This wasn't the first event of this type hosted at Esri's downtown office location (a previous meetup was held in June), nor will it be the last.
On the Esri side, there was a strong showing of staff from both our Redlands headquarters and local office alike, representing technologies far across the board like our Developers Site, Runtime SDKs, and Example Apps groups. Before the night kicked off with talks, the first hour was devoted to mingling, pizza, and drinks. The event drew an audience that had a near 50/50 split to it - there were about equally as many people for whom this was their first GeoDev Meetup as there were seasoned veterans. Given the convenient mix of staff and non-staff attendees, this time offered many great opportunities to ask questions and get answers from both sides of fence!
I, along with co-host Justin Colville, emceed the event. We gave an intro that included an overview of the many developer resources on the ArcGIS platform: GeoNet, DevLabs, open GitHub projects, ArcGIS Code Sharing, as well as demos of what's new on both our native and web development platforms. Mara Stoica wrapped up the opening session by showing a neat AR/VR demo developed on .NET with a private beta coming from our 3D team.
Christopher Moravec engaged us with a 20min keynote talk about how he leveraged the ArcGIS Runtime to build a linear referencing and mapping app for the oil and gas industry. In the manner completely new to the domain, the app is adept at performing pipeline risk assessments and presenting the results visually.
After coming back from a short break, we geared up for three Lightning Talks:
1. Baofeng Dong - Building an on-the-fly web map with Python and Leaflet
Bao was the first to go and took us through an intriguing web app he built for the City of Portland's Trimet to study data patterns. It interrogated transit data to visualize where users who boarded at a particular transit stop were most likely to then disembark.
2. Paul Platosh - Facilities GIS
Paul volunteered early in the night to be added to our list of talks, and we were sure glad he did. Paul showed the work he's been doing for the State of Oregon to design and develop a GIS which accommodates and manages CAD assets, including some in a unique 3D view.
3. Shad Campbell - Widgets?
Shad, having driven some three hours to make the event was also a late addition as a lightning talk. He nonetheless gave an insightful overview of the way Deschutes County is using Web AppBuilder to produce their own, custom web apps for jobs like address geocoding.
Before more socializing and networking to round out the evening, Al Laframboise raffled off some prizes, one of which included a registration to the 2018 DevSummit in Palm Springs!
Stay tuned for future events like this one. Whether you're new to development or just to the ArcGIS platform, both, or a pro when it comes to each, our GeoDev Meetup series is sure to provide a casual and enjoyable atmosphere to network, learn, exchange ideas, and have fun!