I am sorry that I missed your Thursday tutorial. I wasn’t invited. I will be able to figure that stuff out on my own, but it always helps to get that walk-through in the beginning. I am a programmer that loves maps. I started out doing mountain orienteering as a teenager (I could go fast, because of my ability to picture the world by looking at the contour lines), and I really like my GPS receivers. I was totally turned off by commercial GIS, because who can afford that software just for fun? You guys presented a really fun-looking alternative.

The day reminded me of my days as a Comp Sci undergrad. We were so proud of our “hitting the metal, har, har, har!” low-level coding. Industry folks kept commenting on graduate’s non-preparedness for the workforce at conferences, so our professors had us work even harder. When I finally reached the “real world” I was completely unprepared. This was the early nineties and the business world was using SQL, OO, and RAD, and we were trained to write operating systems, and we worked really-hard learning these “wrong” skills, because we really wanted to be ready for work.

Your concerns about the message are reasonable. I was near students and professors (I assume) during the talks, and (at least the folks near me) were struggling to understand the first four lectures. How bad was this? I heard one student (I assume) ask a professor (I assume): “Did he just use the word ‘monolithic’? Is that ‘one rock’? ‘lithic’ is ’stone’, and ‘mono’ is ‘one’?” Another student was wondering out loud if “IT” stood for “Industrial Technology”. Needless to say that Jeremy’s “it’s this simple” message probably wasn’t getting through when he put up that JavaScript on the screen…

So, this reminds me of my own undergrad experience in Comp Sci because these folks didn’t seem to have the same experiences that the industry folks did. It’s one thing to not be a Neo-geographer, but how do you get the most of the ESRI software if you don’t have SQL and other IT skills?

I thank all of you guys for your time. I really saw a new future that day.

Thank you,
Paul

I enjoyed your talk as well. One quick thing though, I am not the ArcGIS Server Dev lead. I work on the dev team as a product engineer and lead a few of the projects that I showcased.

Cheers,

Jeremy