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Alex Leith Profile
Alex Leith

@alexgleith

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Father. Leader. Digital Earth Shenaniganiser. @alexgleith @mapstodon .space

Tasmania
Joined June 2009
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
9 months
Did you know that with 2 Python libraries, 6 lines of code and around 15 seconds, you can load satellite data from anywhere in the world? This is so much easier than it used to be!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
11 months
Iโ€™m giving away a free license and a free free license as prizes at @georabble tonight!! Happy #GISday ๐ŸŽ‰
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
9 months
Following on from my tweet about loading Sentinel-2 data, here's another example from a while ago for working with NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel data. This example creates a cloud-free mosaic. You do need an API key, but it's free.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
9 months
Here's a new example for finding, loading and visualising Sentinel-2 data. It includes a new `odc.explore()` function that gives you a simple visualisation on an interactive map. Credit to @Kirill_kzb and @SatelliteSci for that new feature!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
Around 30 TB of RAM and 6,000 CPUs were used to process 400 TB of data into a cloud-free mosaic over Africa. Thanks to @whatnick and his team, it's pretty easy to do this stuff! We'll be running this for four years of Sentinel-2 data soon in a 'real' run.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
@amazingmap @TerribleMaps All of US COLONIAL history. There's been people there for quite a few orbits of Pluto, actually!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
I've been working on @OpenDataCube and @STACspec integration for a while, including getting some key things into the STAC spec and now that work is paying off! We can index data from @Microsoft 's Planetary Computer into the ODC with a one-line command now ๐Ÿช„ More info soon...
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
We're getting good at this. Processing every Landsat 8 scene ever captured over Africa to build cloud free annual mosaics took two hours on a hundred spot instances.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Finished the @LEGO_Group world map! I didn't create a jupyter notebook and create an accurate map of some ocean parameter, but I did have a lot of fun with my daughters and girlfriend. I was really tempted to just remove NZ to mess with my mappy friends! But left it in instead โค๏ธ
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Looking at @USGSLandsat 9, and I thought I'd compare with 8. Check this out! The Landsat 9 scene is the chunk on the right, and is a square. It's overlaid on the Landsat 8 scenes. It's nearly seamless! Pretty cool ๐Ÿ˜
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
I can now run a query using Dask on @OpenDataCube across all the pixels on Digital Earth Australia's Landsat 8 GeoMedian and calculate the average colour of all of Australia. It's light orange (I think!). 18.8 billion pixels averaged in 2 minutes over 10 servers.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
@AnaLeticiaGIS "What coordinate system is it" "Lat Lon" ...
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
So many youth mappers globally! It must have a huge impact on OSM, as well as the students of course ๐Ÿ™‚ #foss4g2022
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
We're hiring three data engineers to come work on shiny Earth observation tech in a lovely, diverse crew of scientists, software developers and remote sensing professionals. It'll be a hoot!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Pretty sure I have indexing all the 10 m global ESRI Land Cover product working in @OpenDataCube . It's an awesome example of open, interoperable data! We can compare our Australian land cover product with it in notebooks next week :-)
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Hey folks, us @OpenDataCube folks are running a conference and for the first time, we're broadcasting to you! We have one session streaming during Australian day time and one during US/Africa day time, so a timezone for everyone! Come join us ๐Ÿ˜€
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Casually consuming 4 TB of RAM and 2,000 CPUs...
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
8 months
You can tell from this image that the imagery here was captured in 2017 and this region is experiencing some pretty serious recession. Around 25 m a year! Coming to the end of this coastal modelling exercise... hopefully can talk about it more soon.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
If you overlay a 40 year summary of surface water on a 40 year mean (for March) NDVI, the result you get is quite pretty. The @DEarthAfrica platform is really hitting its stride. Over 3 PB of data is available, including some fantastic deep time analyses.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
7 months
Nearly 40 years of evolution of a little sand bar
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Playing around with different land cover products over Africa. We have @DEarthAfrica 's Cropland probability, @ImpactObserv 's and then @ESA_EO 's. (Sorry I don't have the categorical legends working in Jupyter!) This is over Cairo.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
Itโ€™s going to be hot in Italy for @foss4g so I need a hat. But I donโ€™t want to stand out too much. This will be about right, wonโ€™t it?
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
I'm presenting later today as part of the Cloud Native Geospatial Outreach day. I'm hosting @sarasomewhere 's session first, at 5 pm, and then talking about @DEarthAfrica at 5.30 pm, AEST, including far too many live demos! Find out details here:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
There's a position open on my team, where you get to have fun wrangling petabytes of open data, whilst working on open source software and having a hilarious time with the lovely folks in #DigitalEarthAU Check it out:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Holy crap, LiDAR scanning with the iPhone is actually amazing! Took me 10 seconds to do this little scan, with 33 k vertices produced!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
@mdsumner @DuncanBSS You know the weirdest useful shortcut on Mac OS? <command> + <ctrl> + <shift> + v is "paste without formatting". I have know idea how I found that, but it's super useful!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
Learning how to use sat-search with @developmentseed and it's pretty cool. This is a calendar view of satellite data available in public APIs on the command line! #FOSS4G2018
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
8 months
I was interviewed for the @MapScaping podcast. We talked about cloud native geospatial, but from first principles (or thereabouts). I'd love to hear from less technical folks about whether this conversation helps demystify what cloud native means!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
So, once again, @postgis blows my mind. Something that takes a long time in GeoPandas takes seconds in PostGIS. Joining 1.5 million points to 50,000 polygons? Seconds. Neighbor analysis? Seconds... Ridiculous!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
1 year
@GergelyOrosz Sounds pretty authoritarian... Rather than learning from mistakes, just fire the one person who knows the most about what happened and why.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
The @USGSLandsat 's new Landsat 9 data, which was released yesterday, is now available over all of Africa in @DEarthAfrica . Data from just a few days ago is available, for example, this scene over South Africa from the 8th of Feb 2022.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Did you know that @DEarthAfrica has 2.9 PB of freely available Earth observation data covering all of Africa? You can discover it here: And we have a STAC API here: Or an interactive map here:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
A year of rainfall over Africa in super speed. Will try to get 30 years animated by the end of the day!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Want to get paid to play with remote sensing data for 12 months? Pretty awesome opportunity from @Microsoft and @GEOSEC2025
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
The @OpenDataCube is now an @OSGeo Community Project ๐ŸŽ‰ It's been great to work on this project the last few years and recognition of the project by OSGeo is a fantastic milestone for us. Onwards to full Project status!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
9 months
@0xhellz Thereโ€™s Sentinel-2 data being captured constantly. With the two satellites, Sentinel-2A and B, every part of the Earthโ€™s land surface is captured every 5 days with a resolution of 10 m.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
7 months
SAR. So pretty and so weird.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Just under 300 modest sized spot instances starting up. They'll be running for around 10 hours processing a million Landsat scenes over Africa!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
So much happening next week for #geoweek19 . We've been doing a bunch of work preparing data and visualisations for @DEarthAfrica , so make sure if you come and hear about it on Tuesday! And you can view some of our work right now in the DE Africa Map:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
I didn't know you could even further optimise spatial indices in PostGIS by clustering! An order of magnitude performance increase in this example.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
WebGL is like chopping a bunch of carrots at once. Itโ€™s fast as fuck, according to @RealIvanSanchez ๐Ÿฅ• ๐Ÿ”ช #foss4g2019
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
I spoke to a family member today and their family business, a cafe of 20+ years, has had to let go 20 loved staff members because there is simply no way to pay them any more. Just wanted to share, because being able to work from home with kids is an extraordinary luxury.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
1 year
I received my last pay check from the University of Tasmania today, and itโ€™s pretty humbling, as I donโ€™t have a next thing lined up. But Iโ€™m grateful for my experience working there and excited about what lies in the future.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
It's a palindrome date today* 22022022 * For the countries with sensible date formats ๐Ÿ˜‚
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Ok, twenty years of daily rainfall data over Africa animated using the @OpenDataCube on @DEarthAfrica ! You can explore the data too using our Sandbox, or discover it on our STAC API ๐Ÿ˜
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
Itโ€™s my last day at @_FrontierSI_ today and Iโ€™m really looking forward to doing even more with the @OpenDataCube at @GeoscienceAus starting from next week! Hoping the gif is right ๐Ÿ˜‰
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
Twenty people now empowered to use the @OpenDataCube here at @FOSS4G_Oceania . Weโ€™ve used the @GeoscienceAus DEA Sandbox and the training materials prepared in collaboration with @_FrontierSI_ . Big thanks to @caitliniadams and Chris Morgan for their support!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
The tour of the Historical Museum of Italian Cartography was amazing! Thanks to the #FOSS4G2022 folks for organising it.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
Hey folks, find out what we do in #digitalearthaustralia at our public showcase! Complaints about data access? Come. Want to know what data is available? Come. Want to see someone like @SatelliteSci or @Claire_Science talk about amazing science? Also come!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
11 months
This one has a bit more detail in it! Just pushed a 88 GB, 2 m resolution DEM of Tasmania up to @source_coop so it's a bit more easy to access than it used to be. Direct access is available via
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
It's nice to get some positive feedback. I don't need a beer, a nice message is reward enough!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
7 months
We're doing a thing in November! You now have no excuse not to come visit us in Hobart ๐ŸŒ
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
Channeling @StevenFeldman and maps in the wild, this hillshade technique is rather good!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
An 8 bit model of the flooding in Sydney yesterday. Magically produced by one of our data pipelines from near-real time Sentinel-2 data. Thanks to @IndecisiveMatt for being decisive and making this work!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
The @FOSS4G_Oceania committee representing at the @foss4g gala dinner! Good times, @adamdsteer ! #FOSS4G2018
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
1 year
Worked out how to stream the @NASA and @USGSLandsat HLS data straight out of Earthdata and it works really well! Below is a three-month cloud free mosaic of Precipitous Bluff in Tasmania. Notebook is here:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
@TISM1982 @ozjimbob Can we please send @TISM1982 to the next Eurovision?
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
@MaxLenormand @OpenDataCube You can point at a STAC API from Microsoft's Planetary Computer, @DEarthAfrica , @Element84 's Sentinel-2 COGs or the ENTIRE LANDSAT ARCHIVE from @USGSLandsat and load data into an xarray in minutes (with only a small amount of fussing around metadata).
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Where are you @Esri ? Maybe have quiet word, @esriaustralia ?
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
Standing room only for @GeoSkeptic talk on Cloud Native Geospatial. What is CNG? Itโ€™s Google Earth Engine, Matt saysโ€ฆ what does he mean?!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
@mouthofmorrison Have I told you about the new spatial planning company Iโ€™m starting? Urbananalytics. Emphasis on banana.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
The @OpenDataCube 's Cube in a Box has now got automatic indexing of the @esriaustralia Land Cover dataset, so you can work with global Sentinel-2 and Land Cover data in minutes on your local machine or an EC2 instance:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
1 year
Our @FOSS4G_Oceania conference registration desk is open at the Auckland University of Technology! So much happening this week, and a great vibe among workshop participants today! #foss4g23
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Drunken wisdom from Reddit. Priceless! "Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all."
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
Finally got a nice 3D example going in QGIS 3. This is Mt Wellington in the new Tasmanian 10 m DEM. #augistribe
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
Just consuming 2.7 TB of memory and 1,500+ CPUs crunching data. There's a point at which AWS, Kubernetes and all the other little pieces of learning curve become worth it! Should be done by Monday ๐Ÿ˜„
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
There's a nice job leading a team of fancy cloud Earth observation folks available at Digital Earth Australia
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
Teaching kids to make maps! Great presentation from @shemapsau about getting kids into spatial!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
EO is Easy ๐Ÿ˜† Day two presentations from the @OpenDataCube conferences are online.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
ESRI's Land Cover global, 10 m resolution product rendered from COGs through the @opendatacube OWS engine and visualised in QGIS. Pretty cool!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
Software is nice, but @_VincentS_ โ€™s hand crafted, artisanal slides are wonderful! #FOSS4G2022
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
Just received a freshly baked batch of organic @geohipster stickers ready for @foss4g next week. Come find me before they all disappear!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
In case you're not aware, we're running the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial and State of the Map conference later this year. And you can now get involved by sponsoring the event. Check out our sponsorship prospectus here: @FOSS4G_Oceania
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
Hey @pinakographos i finally framed the picture you made for me and it looks great on the wall of my office. Thankyou!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
Who wants a permanent position working on #earthobservation data as part of Digital Earth Australia? #augistribe #foss4g
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
Fucking fantastic! This is now the primary reason I regret not being able to be at the event. You know when the organisers can assemble a panel like this, theyโ€™re real forward thinkers and are building towards the future we want.
@GeoSkeptic
๐™ผ๐šŠ๐š๐š๐š‘๐šŽ๐š  ๐™ท๐šŠ๐š—๐šœ๐š˜๐š—
2 years
Really awesome to see an all-woman panel on satellite data providers in what tends to be a male-dominated field. Nice job @sat_summit ! #satsummit
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
Hey folks, I've put some documentation down about how you can access #digitalearthau data directly from AWS' S3. Also included are notes on SNS notifications for new data. I'd love feedback from anyone this is useful for, or what's missing! #eochat
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Waves in the desert, somewhere in the west of the Great Sandy Desert from #digitalearthAU 's unreleased 2019 Landsat Collection 3 Geomedian.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
1 year
Radar data doesn't make any sense.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
A clear example of the benefits of analysis ready data. Left is a water index run on the @awscloud Landsat PDS level 1 data, and on the right the same index run on @USGSLandsat level 2 data. Thanks to Caitlin on our team at @_FrontierSI_ for creating this using the @opendatacube .
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
We have a role open for a Geospatial Data Engineer. Come work with our team of fancy folks and help us wrangle data for Australia and Africa! Check it out here and please ask me questions:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
Really looking forward to sharing the work of @GeoscienceAus and @_FrontierSI_ in bringing together the data from #DigitalEarthAustralia and the tech from @OpenDataCube into a simple @ProjectJupyter environment so that folks can explore Earth observation data with ease!
@FOSS4G_Oceania
FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2024
5 years
Workshop spotlight: Do you want to understand how to access and enable analysis of over 30 years of earth observation data? Get in quick and join @alexgleith for his workshop on using Digital Earth Australiaโ€™s Open Data Cube:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
Around 18 months ago we embarked on rebuilding an urban planning application using @Mapbox and we weren't sure it would work, but it did, and it's super pretty! (Built with @vuejs , @turfjs , MapBoxGL etc.)
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
6 years
It's great to see @Esri_Geospatial and @SafeSoftware battling for first place in the GDAL Barn Raising! but where are @PitneyBowes , @googlemaps and @Microsoft and the other big guys who use this open source infrastructure?!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
1 year
I'm excited to be working with a great team both in @spc_cps and @D4DInsights to deliver something meaningful for people in the Pacific. It's an exciting program with new challenges and some looming deadlines, all of which will be fun to tackle!
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@AdityaD4D
Aditya Agrawal
1 year
I'm thrilled to welcome @alexgleith to @D4DInsights to support the establishment and launch of the @DEarthPacific program at @spc_cps . His previous experience with Digital Earth will be a huge asset for the Pacific.
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
Great presentation from @Steven_Ramage on the work of GEO taking Earth observation from data to decisions. Itโ€™s really good to hear about their support for the @OpenDataCube and @DEarthAfrica along with @GeoscienceAus . I have a talk on the ODC on Friday if you want to know more!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Nikita from @DEarthAfrica has produced a cloud free mosaic over all of Landsat 5 and 7 over Africa. This image is from 1984, over Cairo viewing three measures of variance. This was made possible by a lot of hard work from @Kirill_kzb as well as a bunch of hardcore science folks!
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
One of the things we do at @osgeo_oceania is support the Oceania open geospatial community through our grants program. This picture attached is from a Women in Mapping event in Kiribati, which we are stoked to be able to support! Find out more here:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
All @OSGeo charter members are now associate members of @opengeospatial under the newly signed MOU. This is great! #FOSS4G2022
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
3 years
Hey web mapping Twitter, does someone know how to make all the tiles in a Leaflet or MapboxGL animated PNG map sync up? Currently it's just random and silly! Map: Code:
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
We've spent $6,000 USD on SPOT EC2 instances doing some work for @DEarthAfrica that we will talk about soon. That may not sound like a lot, but it's a huge amount of computation! Fun times ๐Ÿ˜†
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
7 years
You can now download version 1 of the QGIS ICSM Transformer plugin and run precise transformations between Australian datums using official transformation grids. Get in there and test it! @qgisau @ICSM_gov_au #augistribe
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
2 years
@Spatial_Punk Honestly, it's more like this: Esri QGIS, Geoserver and PostGIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pitney Bowes SuperMap GE Bentley System Hexagon Zondy Crber GeoStar
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
4 years
We have a job going in #digitalearthau . This role leads the cloud team in building platforms that make large volumes of Earth observation data more easily accessible. More importantly, we're a diverse team of people working on #opensource and #opendata !
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@alexgleith
Alex Leith
5 years
I had a great time hosting the panel on Community Building at @FOSS4G_Oceania . Thanks to the panelists, @lyzidiamond , @MammothMapping , @BartDeLathouwer and @Anne_Harper for their insights. And thanks to the audience for their questions. #foss4g_SotM_Oceania
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