Survey of GIS Programming [closed]

Question

Working for Transport for London for last 4 years and previously for MapInfo. Most recently involved with thin client GIS solutions based on Oracle MapViewer and Oracle Spatial databases. Mainly J2EE / AJAX stuff. All our projects are moving this way for various reasons - use of thin client throughout organisation, less licensing issues, easier deployment, much better performance. The GIS bit is the easy part, cleaning up every ones rubbish data is what takes all the effort. Also issues with ETL, we are dealing with databases where some tables hold over 35 billion rows of spatial data and it gets a little taxing at times.

I work with the ESRI ArcGIS stack building a variety of applications ranging from GIS-enabled desktop applications, data management and workflow automation (i.e. middleware), and web-applications. In the past, the work tended to be internal research projects and advanced development/prototype. Of late, my work has been for external customers. My work has primarily been for the government sector.

In a not-too-distant past life, I did some work with a few non-ESRI tools, primarily spatial databases.

Full disclosure: I currently work for ESRI.

• How many programmers on this site work with GIS?

That's unanswerable, but I will guess "lots". You'll only get a sample of those that use the site based on the amount of time it's on the front page, and only a sample of them will read the question, and only a sample of them will answer it.

• What middleware do you work with? ESRI? Mapguide? Google?

I write my own custom mapping software. You'll see why below.

• What kind of projects do you work on? Are you focused on web work, making desktop applications or intranet projects?

Embedded GPS and telematics devices. I do both hardware and software engineering for a wide variety of applications, from consumer GPS devices to tiny tracking and telemetry units. Mostly internet connected. Sometimes the GIS data is on the device, sometimes it's on servers connected via wireless. Some web dev work for the telemetry and tracking - for instance, ultramarathon bicycle races would have a device on the bike (or the crew car following the bike) and sponsers can follow the action online, rather than driving the route as the race progresses.

• What kind of industries do you work in?

Consumer, industrial, sports, shipping, etc. There are a lot of location based industries, or industries with location based applications.

-Adam

I'll answer with a caveat insert: I'm a wannabe programmer working with GIS. :) The tools I work with most often are ArcGIS and GDAL/OGR with some dabbling in QGIS and GRASS. The aspect of GIS where I exercise what little developer chops I have is usually in format conversion and compilation (take this wack of data structured of use in program A, munge it around a bit and mash with data from program B,C&D and export for use in program E). Language of choice so far is python, though when I look back at what has actually been the most successful, measured in terms of number of times re-used or gigabytes of data processed, one would think my preference was AML or win/dos batch scripts.