Oh no, geo!
Geospatial stuff fascinates me. I think that most people were taught the fundamentals of the earth in grade school (latitude, longitude, equator, poles, etc) but then… nothing else. We might hear about the particular latitude of a location when traveling or occasionally see an article about controversial map projections, but unless you’re involved in something like navigation, diplomacy, or you’re a geographer, it doesn’t come into play very often. Or, like me, a developer and someone asks you to do a project that involves mapping, way finding, locating, or just about anything in the real world. If you’re reading this, it’s pretty likely that you are in this category.
Then you get pushed knee deep into math and realize how little you actually know geodesy. Suddenly ,things that seem trivial like finding the widgets within a 10km radius of your location is not a trivial problem to solve. You need to account for the diameter of the earth. You figure out the math but then — wait — you can’t just pull latitude/longitude ranges from a database — that would be a square, but not a square. Ugh. Oh, you want to locate something relatively small? Guess what: the coordinate system was made with sailing vessels in the 18th century in mind. Locating your small widget accurately means you have to delve into the murky waters of high precision floating point numbers (we all know how fun those can be).
Now that I’ve given you a minor anxiety attack, I can tell you that Redis can help and I’m giving a webinar on the subject! It’s free and you can sign up here:
An Introduction to Geospatial Data in Redis Through Urban Forestry
If you happen to miss it — we’ll have a recording and slides for your reference or later viewing. Come check it out!
