How many programmers on this site work with GIS?
What middleware do you work with? ESRI? Mapguide? Google?
What kind of projects do you work on? Are you focused on web work, making desktop applications or intranet projects? What kind of industries do you work in?
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.
I'm a former GIS programmer. I worked for GeoVision Systems in Ottawa for 6 years back in the late-80s, early 90s. Great job, great place to work. These days I've got a semi-GIS related side project that's using PostGIS and a lot of hand-rolled perl code. It's a database of waypoints for pilots, and a system for producing subsets of that data for various GPS and flight planning apps.
I hope some day to get back into GIS programming, but there just isn't any here in Rochester NY.
Not a real GIS programmes, but our software works with ESRI shape files. We make environmental modeling software (noise and air quality). And we now have support for kml files which is kind of neat.
We are an consultancy agency that has its own software group (and we also sell the software to others).
I mostly work on intranet software that deals with utilities, though I've done a few quick small projects working with real estate that were on the web.
I mostly work with ESRI software, though I've had a little bit of work with Mapguide, mostly for clients whose engineering departments are using CAD more than ArcMAP.
I'm a former GIS programmer. We used ESRI's ArcLogistics Navigator SDK to provide turn-by-turn directions and onboard tracking of commercial vehicles.
The SDK was fairly easy to use and had a small footprint, albeit a little light weight on the features (e.g., no geocoding of addresses).
I work on ArcObjects, extending ESRI's ArcGIS Desktop. Am currently, working to extend my skill set to the server domain, and figuring the world on Opens source on the side.
We focus mainly on the emergency services industry, primarily we work with ESRI ArcObjects developing desktop applications and SDE. Recently, we also did a bit of work open-source GIS SharpMap developing apps for our lower cost clients. Did a little work with Manifold last year, and there is some interest in doing more development with KML and google but for now we are mainly a ESRI shop.
I develop on the ESRI stack. I'v built applications on ArcMap, ArcIMS, SDE, ArcEngine, ArcReader, MapObjects and ArcGIS Server. I'v built an ArcIMS viewer from the ground up using .NET with full custimizable interface and backend admin. Its called the iDV idv.civilsolutions.biz. We focus on government work and do all types of applications. From simple process tools to whole custom work flow applications. I'v developed applications on desktop, server, web & database.
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.
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.
I write my own custom mapping software. You'll see why below.
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.
Consumer, industrial, sports, shipping, etc. There are a lot of location based industries, or industries with location based applications.
I actually work for one of the two major players in the map market, so yes I work with GIS stuff and what we produce is what most of you load into your ESRI or google stack. I would say that my industry is digital maps with a strong focus on navigation.
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.
I suppose I would be considered a GIS Programmer. The company I work for has historically never hired programmers with previous mapping experience.
Tools I use include: Autodesk Mapguide, MapInfo, FME, SQL 2008 and Virtual Earth.
I started in my career using Avenue Script in ArcView 3.x.
We do web work for the most part. Though we have a lot of data so sometimes I help in ETL type arena as well.
I used to work for an ESRI business partner, we had a couple of ArcGIS Engine-based Tablet PC applications and also did a lot of customisation stuff for ArcMap and ArcSDC (all in C#, using ArcObjects). I started with one of the beta version of ArcObjects 8. Our clients were mostly in the Utilities sector, as well as a couple of national mapping agencies (hint: I'm in the UK!).
More recently I've done some Google Maps work, some in my spare time. Check out My California Traffic - this site had realtime freeway traffic data shown on a Google Map about a year before Google added this facility to their main maps site.
I'm a former GIS programmer. I worked
with ESRI ArcObjects on the desktop and ArcGIS Server for about 3 years.
Update: I'm working in GIS again.
I am hobbist GIS programmer. I have have a desktop application written in VB6 that uses Blue Marbles GeoView mapping component to build digital maps for locations using ESRI shape files and geotiffs.
I've done some simple GIS programming, reading ESRI shapefiles and GeoTIFF raster files. We rolled our own computational geometry code to work on polygon data and rendering in GDI+ and directx.
Then just recently I took a course in ArcGIS just to learn basic work flow.
I'm not a GIS programmer, but I am a Java programmer building a website using ESRI ArcGIS server 9.3 with Oracle 10g. We are using the rest javascript api for the map, and mostly the ST functions of the SDE for the backend work. We will be using NetworkAnalyst via the java api, and possibly arcobjects as we add functionality.
Late to the party. However:
I've developed/am developing several desktop extensions for ArcGIS (and before that, ArcView... Avenue, I miss you!); I've also been using OpenLayers and using PostGIS reasonably extensively lately.
Some of my work is open source: http://code.google.com/p/boundary-generator/
One of the nicest things about doing GIS work is that it has given me the opportunity to work with conservation nonprofits -- a nice way to have a career, and for a cause!
I am a developer for a small software company that specializes in extensions to the GE Smallworld family of products. Smallworld isn't a well known GIS, especially in the US, but it is widely used by utilities. Our customers are natural gas and/or electric companies.
I worked with ESRI MapObjects and ESRI AcrObjects, mainly for Defence projects. Also worked with SevenCs (nice SDK) for S-57 formats.
I have been involved in GIS development for nearly 15 years now. First as a commercial software developer using C++ and now I primarily develop applications in C# using ArcObjects. I have dome some custom desktop working using GDAL and other open source libraries, but I must admit that I prefer the quality of ESRI and other platforms.
I also suggest that developer evaulate Manifold. The company is very quirky, but the product isn't bad. The downside is the developer support pales in comparison to ESRI and you need to spend excessive amounts of time re-developing the wheel. Nonetheless, it has a much lower entry point, cost wise, compared to ESRI.
I'm not really into GIS, but have done some work in the area using the ESRI stuff.
Cleaning up the raw data, and extracting useful information from it is the hardest part: http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:10313
As a consultant I've been developing for a client from scratch a client-side JavaScript map control with a public API for a proprietary tile-based map engine. The whole thing very much resembles the Google Maps API both in functionality and structure.
we work mainly w/web-based GIS using java, coldfusion & lately flex w/arcIMS, arcGIS & mapServer on the backend. we deal w/a variety of GIS work, some "embedded" as in simply displaying sample locations on relevant maps (eg. gem samples vs geology) to full blown GIS apps for managing environmental & mineral resources.
I'm really late to this party since I didn't even know about stackoverflow.com until a few minutes (which is embarrassing to say after checking the site out...not sure how I missed it).
I'm a GIS Programmer and have been since the mid-90s. I'm currently on the ESRI-stack and just starting a migration from ArcGIS Server 9.2 to 9.3 on a SQL Server 2008 DB and I'm excited about seeing what I can do with the GEOMETRY data type in SQL Server. I'll be even more excited to use SharpMap.v2's SQLSRV2008 data provider.
At home, I play with postgresql/postgis and I've been goofing around with spatialite as well.
I have some tools that use the Net Topologoly Suite(NTS) and some OGR libraries, but nothing that huge or impressive. Although I did learn that there's a lot that you can do without the ESRI's engine.
I'm working on building extensions into ArcMAP, using C# (since we have other Windows COM objects we need to interact with) in MS Visual Studio.
I am working using .net fw. on Esri componenets. At my place we are devloping an intranet applications but we are using both Web applications and client-server (using ArcGis Explorer and custom-made client app)
Moreover, we also creating lots of WCF-Services above the Gis tools so any non-Gis client could enjoy our work!
I do not work in GIS anmore, but I did my master's thesis on model generalization. (Modellgeneralisierung in german). The task was to write a program that converts geo-data in the german ATKIS format (1:25,000) to the european Corine Land Cover (1:100,000) format. Both datasets were represented in polygons in Oracle Spatial, and the main task was merging adjacent polygons to reduce the polygon-count without losing more information than necessary.
The programming was done in Java, simply because it was the language I knew (and know) best, and there are already good libraries such as JTS (java topology suite) for it.
The problem is not really solved yet. My counselor at the university keeps working on it, and is trying a raster-data-based approach.
I use(d) following:
I worked on line of end user application in following areas:
Although I would not consider myself a GIS programmer (I just recently found out what Geoprocessing is all about after 8 years of doing programming with GIS), I do work with ESRI's ArcGIS Engine as well as MapObjects. We're also doing a little bit with ArcGIS Server.
I work for a flood control district in Las Vegas. We use GIS mainly on the desktop, for our engineering staff, but we also have a web presence designed to provide access to flood-related information to external engineers and citizens.
EDIT: Now getting into ESRI's Flex API. Really exciting. They're finally catching up with Google.
I work for a small company that produce several spatially enabled products.
We have done Mapserver/php-mapscript/postgis projects but we are moving towards dotnet solutions using MapXtreme (Mapinfo) MS SQL 2008
2-3 developers work with GIS here, using a mix of MapGuide, Google Maps, FME, ArcObjects. In-house municipal applications.
I work with MapInfo's MapX and MapInfo Professional a lot. More than I want to -- I really want to upgrade our software to MapExtreme 2008 (I hate how companies use EXTREME -- but I digress).
I have, in the past, worked with ESRI's stack of ArcView, ArcGIS and MapObjects as well. This is about 9 years of working in the field as a software developer.
I work for Microsoft in the US Government and Education sector. Although I'm no GIS expert, I am finding that almost all of our projects have a GeoSpatial component. Let's face it, location information is a requirement of most modern line of business systems - especially in Government.
I frequently work with Microsoft's Virtual Earth (now called Bing Maps for Enterprise). I find it easy to learn and get up to speed quickly. There is a very nice interactive SDK that makes learning it easy. http://www.microsoft.com/maps/isdk/ajax/
We use Virtual Earth for simple requirements like geocoding locations, mashups that overlay customer data on maps, etc. VE has some nice capabilities of late including GeoRSS and KML support, simple layers etc. Also VE and ESRI are teaming together. ESRI is doing some very interesting integration with ARCGis, VE, and Silverlight.
Also, SQL Server 2008 has a new geospatial data types that enable you to write location based queries.
I have come to really love working with this technology. It is fun because it is so interactive and visual. You can accomplish a lot in a short time and it is easy to learn.
I've been developing GIS applications for about 12 years now. I work with the ESRI stack, mostly server-based applications (ArcGIS Server, etc.). My specialty is web applications and most of my clients are public entities or private utility companies, with the occasional private business looking to integrate GIS.
I also do Ruby on Rails consulting on the side.
I am working on ESRI arcgis .net web adf.
we are mainly focus on web. we are mainly focused on world wide offshore oil & gas fields.
My company develops mission planning software for satellites, so we have some geographic data, although we often convert that to geodetic data. Our software is in .Net 2.0 (C#) and NetTopologySuite. For visualization for the end-user we use STK (v7,8, or 9) or Google Earth.
I use both MapGuide classic (6.x) and MapGuide Open Source on a number of projects
The Explore Australia Travel Guide I developed used maps from MapGuide with the tiles hosted on Amazon CloudFront
I have to high recommend openlayers as well, closed source propriety stuff is rather 1990's in the geospatial world. I went to FOSS4G in Sydney and it was rather impressive what is available.
On the database side I use mostly oracle, postgis is nioce, just haven't got round to using it yet
I'm a GIS Software Developer. Most of my time I work with Cadcorp SIS technologies as well as with large number of Free and Open Source Software for GIS projects, mainly those from the OSGeo Foundation stack like GDAL/OGR, GEOS, PROJ.4, PostGIS as well as Boost.Geometry (aka Generic Geometry Library) - mainly as a programmer and contributor, but also as a user, of course.
I also used to work a lot with Autodesk's Feature Data Objects (FDO).
I've been developing GIS applications for over 15 years now. Used a variety of tools over the years including ArcGIS, MapInfo, Manifold, TatukGIS, and open source. I have all but abandoned MapInfo and Manifold. For consulting work you cannot go wrong with ESRI. Great set of tools that cover everything from server to desktop to the web. Open Source is also another great option for clients with a more limited budget. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation has really expanded over the years and provides a great toolkit for the geospatial developer.