Personas in product design
Personas are representations of user groups whom we expect to use our products. They help to convey information about the users to the product team. Some products target just a single user group, but most will have mo...
Recent Posts
Moving window operations across arrays
Applying functions using moving windows are a common feature of geospatial data analysis and often exist “under the hood” of GIS software. If you’ve ever calculated a slope or aspect grid from a raster elevation datas...
Fork vs Spawn in Python Multiprocessing
I recently got stuck trying to plot multiple figures in parallel with Matplotlib. It took five hours to find a two-line fix to make it work. Afterwards I spent even more hours learning about multiprocessing in order t...
CentOS 7, Ansible and the end of Python 2
Python 2 vs 3 mismatches have been causing problems in our CentOS 7 server adminstration. We use Ansible for automatic configuration and continuous integration deployments. A few of our long-used jobs recently broke b...
Benefits of creating technical documentation using GitHub pages
There are known challenges when publishing technical documentation / reports when using PDF or other desktop office formats which is why we endeavor at the BGS to publish our documentation using HTML