Calling all Gurus
You know what the geo blogosphere really lacks? Gurus. Seasoned, opinionated, frankly critical, highly credible people writing about implementations. Experts in technology or methodology, writing with good style, clarity, and a sense of humor. Where are our Martin Fowlers, Tim Brays, Paul Grahams, Mark Pilgrims, and Joel Spolskys?
Geoff Zeiss has potential. His photo reminds me of the older fisherman I'd see back when I was a hack fly-caster. The kind of guy who could step up to a hole that I'd whipped fruitlessly to a fine froth, and tease out a trout on the first cast. But he's expressing the Autodesk viewpoint and not implementations in general.
Don't be fooled by his twenty-something looks (on display in his blog banner); Ed Parsons is a seasoned industry vet. He's written some provocative posts, but identifies more with CxO bloggers than we techies.
Charlie Savage and Matt M from Let's Push Things Forward bring a lot of the nitty gritty I crave. If they'd write more about data, and spice it up, I think they could be future gurus.
Comments
Re: Calling all Gurus
Author: James Fee
I don't think you can be a guru and use blogger. You gotta draw the line somewhere.Re: Calling all Gurus
Author: Jeremy
I vote for Brian Flood. I also like Matt from LPTF, but you are going to have a hard time getting him to talk about data...Re: Calling all Gurus
Author: Jeremy
Oops...Forgot about Dave Bouwman and Matt Perry.Re: Calling all Gurus
Author: Dave
Thanks for the props Jeremy, but I think have a ways to go yet on the "writing with good style, clarity, and a sense of humor" side of things. And my posting frequency is pretty low... Speaking of which, I have been meaning to write more "implementation" related posts. But the water runs deep in this area, and the posts get really long and require a lot of background info. Many of our clients are state govt or military, so there is concern about security. Curiously, these are mainly forest managment systems, so I'm not sure where the security issue is - maybe some squirrels getting the low down on some good Oak stands? And we have some other clients who don't want us talking about the details of what we did for them, which is bummer b.c that's the cool part!Re: Calling all Gurus
Author: Sean
I appreciate the comments. Without a comments RSS or email notification, I'm lucky anybody even bothers. I should get a babysitter and spend an evening hacking those into this crappy blog software. I'm setting a higher bar for Guru. Ideally the person would not be bound to a particular platform. Consider Pai Mei (pictured): he can kick your ass in a hundred ways and means. Fist, foot, sword, rolled-up newspaper, slice of american cheese ... all are equally deadly when deployed by the master. A true guru would have insights that weren't restricted to .NET, or Arc*, or Python.Re: Calling all Gurus
Author: Tom Kralidis
Good point. My first guess is that many of the geo-gurus are already up to their ears :) Having said this, I like Jody's blog as it goes into the weeds from time to time, as opposed to always discussing 'the scene'.Re: Calling all Gurus
Author: Ed Parsons
20 something looks ?? Such are the wonders on internet comic artists. I guess I used to me more of a techie, and could still write about some painful recent experiences connecting a oracle 10g spatial cluster through a infiband switch to our corporate LAN - but then you know I don't think many of my readers are "real" technologists. edRe: Calling all Gurus
Author: Charlie
Thanks for the plug Sean - at least I'm not alone in having to spice it up :) Curious what you have in mind about data? If you want a data guru, I'd say talk to Donnie, he's full of all sorts of intersting stories from Digital Globe and other places he's worked. I'm just a programmer at heart...