Geomatics – Measuring, Modeling, and Mapping

I wanted to write an article describing what Geomatics is. Or at least, try to touch on the core ideas of what being a Geomatics engineer is all about, or what you might end up studying if you decide to get into Geomatics yourself.

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Fun with friends - Text bombing

This is something I discovered recently that may be a bit of an… anti-feature. The gist of it is, by using some basic system automation, I managed to automate my phone such that I could endlessly text my friends. Like, anything I wanted, and for pretty much forever. It was surprising to me that 1) Android exposes this behaviour, but mostly 2) that it was so simple to set up.

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Version Control Systems

Recently, I gave a presentation to my research group at the university on Version Control Systems, specifically regarding why and how to use Git. Given my position as a grad student, that may sound odd, so here’s some context. While there exists a non-trivial amount of programming involved in the Geomatics department, our program does not necessarily cover a wealth of software engineering practices or techniques. Certainly one of the greater tragedies of the department, is that there’s simply not enough time to teach everybody both the underlying mathematics that we use day-to-day, and likewise how to better organize and write software. Given I do have some experience with version control software, I decided it may be useful for other members of my group if I presented some of this knowledge to the group. I recieved some really positive feedback from the presentation, and decided to make a post about it, if only for future reference.

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Comments are not documentation

It’s no secret to my friends that love programming. Moreover, to my colleagues at work, it’s no secret that I am very passionate about it as a hobby and as something I do (semi-)professionally. Unfortunately, or perhaps not-so-unfortunately, I learned to code while I was going through my Bachelors in Engineering. While my courses, and eventually my own self-directed learning stuck with me, I never quite got the same education as somebody who was in Software Engineering or Computer Science. Nonetheless, I have worked through some hellish codebases before, and while I may not be an enterprise coder, I do think that I’ve enough experience thus far to discuss an opinion that I’ve received a lot of flak for recently. If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about code comments.

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Two birds and a liar's game

This post was largely inspired by an image I encountered while browsing the yard sale we call the internet. It’s somewhat contrived, but it’s a play on a classic riddle. I’m going to examine this riddle in detail, and hopefully slay god and have some fun with logic in the meantime.

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