Frugosapalooza in Fort Collins

I'm so glad Dave Bouwman made it out because the question of the night was: coming from an all-ESRI environment, how hard is it to learn and get up to speed on an entirely new software stack? It's hard, and I don't deny that, but Dave reminded people that you don't need to take on everything at once. I think it's easier to start using open source on the very front or back ends. Maybe just try OpenLayers as the map interface for a new project, or try gdal_translate or ogr2ogr for ploughing through data offline before it is loaded into your database.

Turnout was surprisingly good: 10 of us, which is even better, per capita, than the huge (25-ish) Denver meetup. The MapWrecker was sorely missed, but the up side of that is nothing was broken.

By coincidence, the local Hacking Society was also meeting at the Bean Cycle tonight. Conversation with Sean and Evelyn reminded me that I probably should have submitted a presentation on Shapely and other Python GIS software to the PyCon committee.