At some point in the last decade, I semi-consciously started to fork away from mainstream development and into the nichey/enterprisey ESRI Utility GIS space. This has been a world largely frozen in time, mostly immune to the prevailing technical winds of the 21st century.

In addition to following the, erm, Waterfall project methodology, here’s a list of some of the technologies in play in this world; COM(!), Oracle PL/SQL or SQL Server T-SQL, .NET of the Winforms variety, file & data-level integration, everything on-premise and, most perplexingly, Silverlight…

As a way of at least keeping up with terminology & tools browsing hacker news has been superb. However, it has left me with a headspinning “all the things” feeling. But with my current project winding down, it’s time to take a series of leaps forward into whatever is current. Of course, I’m not exactly sure how this works with the fragmentation.

There is no roadmap but a few things:

• pursue open-source geospatial tech. ESRI has been, and continues to be, a great platform. Sure, it’s large and hairy but the company is dedicated to innovation and making things work. But it would be crazy not to gain a deeper understanding of the alternatives, and hopefully see what’s better/worse.
• find something(s) concrete to get stuck into. The only way to learn something is by implementing it. These may be proofs-of-concept or something bigger.
• Blog/publish thoughts/ideas/code. Even if I am the sole reader, something inside me says this is the way to go.