Insights

Zekiah Technologies is a small company, and it can be hard to make ourselves stand out from the crowd in the eyes of potential new employees. While salary, health benefits, and vacation days are incredibly important considerations for applicants, I’d like to take the time to  talk a little bit about the unquantifiable benefits of working with us: all those little things that can make a company a great place to work but never quite make it into the company description. Good work location The headquarters of Zekiah Technologies is…

Zekiah is a prominent employer at NSWC Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) located in King George County, VA.   Many of our hires are local residents but we also recruit from outside the area and we are frequently asked, “Why should I move to King George?” Exciting work at Dahlgren The best reason to work in the area is the work being done at NSWCDD is exciting and cutting edge.    It’s a versatile workforce supporting versatile fields of expertise ranging from mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry, biology, and computer science creating innovative solutions for…

Driving to Zekiah Technologies for the first time as a new intern, there was only the road and my questions. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the people there and I didn’t know what they were going to expect from me. The questions intensified as I drove. When I finally arrived, my head was buzzing with uncertainties as I turned to see the Zekiah offices for the first time. Looking at the small unassuming La Plata building that houses offices for Zekiah Technologies it could be hard to imagine…

I like to think that I learn more every day, but I still really embrace being a computer novice in a lot of ways. About four years ago, I learned about using Windows’ Task Scheduler to run processes on a defined timetable. The typical things it became useful for in my daily activities were: backing up data from my local machine to a server, running processes during off-hours that consume significant system resources, and automating web download workflows/preparing the data before I arrived at work. It’s best for uses requiring…

While I was in graduate school I didn’t understand why people got master’s degrees in geospatial analysis. Well, I guess I understood it, but I thought it looked like a miserable job.   I would come back from a field excursion with dirt covering me from eyebrows to boot tips, a month’s worth of lab samples in my backpack, happy as can be.   I felt sorry for the geospatial people staggering out from their computer-heated cave.  Now I have become one of those people; one of those sore-eyed, computer-staring people but…

For most of my adult life I’ve dealt with an achy back. It started years ago when I worked at a pet store slinging 50 pound bags of pet food all day, and then come home to more physical work.  When I started working at a desk, I found it to be quite a transition from moving constantly to parking myself in front of a computer all day. My aches didn’t improve. I just started getting new aches like a stiff neck and knots in my shoulders. Around the time…

On 30 September 2015, I gave a talk to the Southern Maryland GIS User Group titled "Interactive Maps Without Map Servers." This post consists of the slides from that presentation interspersed with my "talk track" in order to provide context. Today, I’m going to discuss publishing interactive maps without using a map server. I’m going to do this by focusing on a specific case study for one of our customers, the US Commission on Civil Rights. This example is fairly simple and I chose it for its ease of illustration…

Managing a team of Geospatial Analysts, and all their ongoing projects, requires a decent bit of effort for the Project Manager on one of our current contracts. At the onset, the PM would ask each GA what they were working on, obtain it verbally or via email, and manually enter the information into an excel spreadsheet. He would then discuss the spreadsheet with the client each week, noting any task updates or closures. The importance of the spreadsheet and the weekly client meetings cannot be understated; however, I believed that…

While working with geospatial information, it is often advantageous to find out how close one particular piece of data is to other pieces of data. This leads to a greater understanding of the area of study. The knowledge of how things relate to one another spatially is articulated in Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography. It states that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” This became especially important in one of our current contracts, as we needed to discover which feature…

Over the past decade, GIS professionals who can manipulate the software both manually and automatically are becoming increasingly more marketable within the industry. Automating mundane/repetitive tasks frees up time to focus on more advanced analyses and other GIS processes. On one of our current contracts, we are required to create map products in response to “breaking news” events. These maps provide situational awareness to our client regarding the status of assets within their area of jurisdiction. Time is of the essence during these events, and the faster a map product…