Mr. Ali S. Habib (1956–2020) It’s not often one cold emails one of the most successful business leaders in Pakistan and they reply within a few hours, from their mobile phone. But in winter of 2018 that’s exactly what happened. Ali S. Habib’s reply to my email with a proposal to start an Artificial Intelligence…

Today, almost to the day is the 6th anniversary of a mapping party that Ivan Gayton , Kashif Rasul and myself organized in Berlin. Little did I know that it would lead to a sustained movement to map previously unmapped parts of Africa on OpenStreetMap (OSM). Move from disaster response mapping to mapping for preparedness Ivan and I first…

Unless you have been living under a rock you know that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are starting to capture the interest of mainstream community. While I’m not particularly optimistic about the short term uptake of crypto currencies for day-to-day shopping due to it’s volatility as well as just the practicality, I do believe the technology of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) or blockchain has the potential to form the backbone for smart contracts. This gets particularly interesting when combined with Artificial Intelligence. I believe this is going to disrupt a number of industries and jobs in the next 5–10 years.

Here are the main reasons we have switched to Yarn package manager for our Javascript projects It caches every package it downloads — so no waiting if you delete your node_modules directory you can install it in offline mode It’s secure: it uses checksums to verify the integrity of every installed package before its code is executed It comes with a guarantee that an install that worked on one system will work exactly the same way on any other system

Part 1: Running PySpark + Jupyter on EMR This post is an introduction to Apache Spark, Geospatial Big Data Analysis and Amazon EMR Stack. If you don’t know what that is read on… Introduction As you can infer from my instagram map below I travel a fair bit around Europe. It’s all for research purposes (really!). I live in…

In this post I will share with you how we deploy application to the cloud at Geografia using Docker Cloud, Amazon AWS or Digital Ocean. tl;dr We wanted to make application deployment and scaling as easy as running docker-compose up. So we built a deployment pipeline using docker cloud. This…

If you are starting from scratch the last two articles about this setup should be checked out here and here. There I explain how to setup a development and production docker-compose configuration. Assuming that’s done, we can now deploy the application to DigitalOcean. # get your API token from digitalocean…

In this post we will learn to Configure docker compose for a production setup of a PostGIS + Ruby on Rails 5.0.1 application with nginx as proxy server We will build on the development version of the application we create in my last post here. …

In this post we will learn to: Configure `docker-compose` for Rails 5 + PostGIS development We will start by setting up the following for our development environment: Create a `Dockerfile` Create a `docker-compose.yml` file Create an `.env` file for environment variables Configure `database.yml` Update `Gemfile` with postgis adapter APP_NAME=dockerized-rails rails…