What's your job about?
My employer, Eagle Technology, is the distributor for the Esri geospatial system in New Zealand. Eagle builds a product on top of this system, LocalMaps, which adds additional integration, reporting, and management capabilities to the Esri system. It’s this that I spend most of my time working on. A typical week for me would include helping troubleshoot issues in LocalMaps, updating the code to fix these issues when needed, as well as working on new features for our customers and working with our product owner to help customers get the most out of our software. Another part of my job as part of the Eagle Technology GIS Technical Solutions team is learning about new technologies (for me particularly those that developers are interested in), researching how we might use these, and sharing these findings with our customers.
What's your background?
I was homeschooled, growing up surrounded by the beautiful countryside of Victoria and South Australia. As a result, I’ve always had both a love of learning and a deep appreciation for nature. In my last year of school, I decided to go and study to be a Land Surveyor – a job that I thought might combine my love of the outdoors with my academic abilities. But it was not to be. Over the course of my studies, I discovered this “GIS” thing – the computer side of mapping – and was drawn to the power web mapping technologies havs to make spatial data both interesting and useful. I decided to go on and do an honours degree researching cartography through developing a web mapping application of a long-distance hiking trail. I also took the opportunity to take on some casual and contract work to gain some practical experience – spending time as a survey assistant, GIS technician in local government, as a teaching assistant, and completing some web GIS projects for a couple of universities.
I finished my university education with a relatively specialised combination of GIS and web development skills, but not much idea where I’d use them. I decided to shift over to Wellington – and eventually landed on the internship offered by Eagle Technology. Eagle has really assisted my journey from that first day as an intern to my position now – as well as gaining a fantastic grounding in GIS, I’ve been supported in learning full stack development using a bunch of different technologies. As a result, I can now meaningfully contribute to our in-house LocalMaps development as well as helping developers from other companies use Esri tools.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
GIS is one of those cool, multi-disciplinary areas that attracts people from a wide range of areas. A lot of my knowledge and skills are self-taught – for me, it’s been as much about the ability to learn and to work obsessively on problems till they are solved, as it has been background and education. Other than a couple of very basic introductory papers, my programming skills have been pretty much entirely self-taught. That said, particularly for my job, there’s a couple of skills that are essential. Firstly, you need to be willing to take on problems outside your comfort zone and sphere of knowledge and figure them out. And second, you need to be able to learn new technologies and concepts quickly, gaining a broad enough knowledge base to understand the big picture without getting too bogged down in the details.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
The coolest thing about working at Eagle is our relationship with Esri – we have access to Esri technologies without many of the limitations of other companies, access to pre-release software and internal information on what’s coming up, and the option of dealing directly with our Esri colleagues to work through things.
What are the limitations of your job?
My job can be pretty intense at times. Often when you start working on something you have no idea where to begin, particularly when it comes to fixing niggly software bugs. There’s also often a difference between the best way of doing things, the ideal approach to developing and supporting a piece of software, and the practical reality of doing this in the real world. Finally, sometimes you will need to do some out of hours work, or be ready to support other consultants doing likewise.
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