So it looks like Steve Coast will be attending a mapping party here in Denver this weekend to promote the free wiki world map and do some mapping of local streets, trails, etc.  The best part is that it starts and finishes at Wynkoop's brewery downtown. Check out Peter Batty's blog for the details as he is the host.

Tuesday, June 22, 2008 from 9 am to 4pm, RM/URISA is putting on another installment of their geospatial technology series dealing with real world interoperability examples using open data standards.  My boss will giving a talk at the event based upon some work we've been doing with both "heavyweight" standards like those put out by the OGC as well as some of the lighterweight standards like KML, JSON, and GeoJSON that have gained in popularity with the neogeography movement.

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So I took some time awhile back to pick on recruiters a bit and wanted to take a few minutes and jot down some thoughts about the technical interview process for developers.  Time to pick on interviewers, including myself for awhile.  First, you must all go read my favorite post ever about technical interviews.  You have to admit, Jason has an interesting view of the world yes?  I've interviewed at MS and it wasnt' very fun...I was poorly prepared and not in the right mindset.  I'll probably never be in the right mindset for that organization but one should still strive to minimize the number of times they look stupid in front of an industry leader.  Now, most of what I know about interview prep (for myself and others) comes from the likes of Gladwell, Spolsky, and Hanselman.  In fact, like alot of other folks I know, I spent a lot of sleepless nights up doing research when Scott started posting his "everybody should know these technical questions" lists.  And that's fine, it keeps one sharp if folks like Scott are always challenging us and thousands of tech leads the world over are stealing his questions to ask me in an interview. 

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I've been converting some GDI+ rendering code to use ESRI Graphics Layers...you know: IElement, ISymbol and all the usual suspects. The application environment I've been working in is a distributed app with many different clients and prior to my arrival on the project the decision was made that all custom symbologies would be serialized into an RDBMS, extracted at run-time, and sent down to each client at log on. It's just as well, since leveraging file paths and resource file images isn't exactly straightforward due to the need for us to leverage an unmanaged COM picture interface to create our custom picture marker symbols.

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