Giving engineers a voice

At FortiusOne, we have developed and launched a number of advanced projects. Our flagship product, GeoIQ, and the public GeoCommons application have been leading-edge web platforms for the sharing, visualization, and analysis of geographic data. Along the way we’re incorporating a variety of needs from the GIS, business intelligence, government, and other needs and processes and integrating into existing workflows.

Behind it all is our amazing team of engineers that track the latest technologies, and build amazing components, libraries, and applications. We utilize a variety of tools, many open-source. And where there are key pieces missing, we have developed solutions and even open-sourced them to the greater benefit of the community.

In addition, we spend much of our time thinking about how to bring geospatial techniques to non-geospatial users. We focus on how to make simpler interfaces, faster services, and deploy to a variety of platforms: from the web, through the cloud, to intranets, and even far flung corners of the world.

So what has been missing from the FortiusOne blog has been this voice of our engineers. To date we have not shared as much as we would like about some of the valuable lessons learned developing GeoCommons and other products and services. Insights that can hopefully help other developers, as well as users and customers.

To address this, our engineering team will start blogging as well. We have a lot to talk about – and not all of it geographic. Underneath the hood we’ve done a lot of intriguing things with the Ruby on Rails framework, deploying web applications in offline environments, open data federation, usable metadata interfaces and standards, efficient data storage and retrieval, and high-volume visualization.

Expect a mix of geospatial technology as well as broader web and technology development. Let us know if there is something in particular that you are interested in learning about.