May and June 2023

Published on at update , 4 mins.

For the first time since I started these monthly updates, I will do this for a two months periods since I’ve been pretty busy lately. Next week I’m traveling so I don’t want to defer more the update.

🏠 Personal

May was not a super busy month, with some of the regular dining out, and municipal and region elections in May 28th with some unpleasant results. We’ll see how much this change in the city and region governments affects us over the next four years.

Things got more hectic by the end of the month with the collision of several things: me going to Madrid for an event (more later), having our apartment occupied for a few days by the installation of AC, and the delivery of the news on our first assignment for Bernat’s pre and primary school. That eventually was confirmed and now we know the school for Bernat until he’s 12! 🤯

Then after a week I had to travel again to Girona for another event and I will be traveling one more time this Sunday to Kosovo. In between we had more stuff going on at home with the result of not having a “normal” week since mid May.

One last thing is that I finally got rented my old apartment 🎉.

Mural painting in the closest playground park to our new school
Mural painting in the closest playground park to our new school

👨‍💻 Professional

On the work side there isn’t much to report. I’ve been busy with a couple of projects but I also had some open time (Elastic calls that Space/Time weeks) to learn more about two exciting technologies related with webmapping. One is a software to generate basemaps around two orders of magnitude faster than the current approach, and the other is a way to serve basemaps without a middleware, leveraging a well-known (actually old) technology.

I don’t think I will use the second at work directly but the first one will for sure improve our processes internally.

Me at the SDSC bootcamp
Me at the SDSC bootcamp

The room for my SIG Libre workshop
The room for my SIG Libre workshop

❤️ Community

Last weeks have been busy on the community side. First, with the Spatial Data Science Bootcamp participation with a session about Geospatial Foundations. My contribution was paid with a donation to Cibervoluntarios which was a very generous idea from the organization.

Then later I attended the SIG Libre conference in Girona. This is my second favorite event of the year after FOSS4G. I’ve been going every year to this conference since 2007 and it is the place to keep updated with what is going on in the geospatial community in Spain. On this event I did a two hour workshop on doing some maps with Elasticsearch.

As I said before, this Sunday I will be traveling to Prizren, Kosovo, for this year global FOSS4G conference, thanks to the support of Elastic. I’m looking forward to meet with all the geopeople from all around the globe. I will be repeating the same workshop I did in Girona. It is the first time the two events are this close in time. Being hard with family and all, I kind of like that we will have the rest of the summer free of community events.

Girona river, never get tired of this view
Girona river, never get tired of this view

The meals and discussions at SIG Libre never disappoint
The meals and discussions at SIG Libre never disappoint

📚 Reading

Last two months I slowed down a bit my reading but I’ve continued my trip on Ursula K Le Guin Earthsea stories:

I will finish Dragonfly and then I have no idea what’s next but I will probably revisit my Goodreads account for stuff I marked recently that interests me.

🔊 Listening

A selection of non-musical podcasts from these last two months: