FOSS4G-NA 2018

On Monday, May 14th, I got to present at FOSS4GNA in St. Louis, MO. I talked abput our ATLAS glacier monitoring system, which uses an autonomous LiDAR scanner to regularly survey the Helheim Glacier. The talk was half science, half software engineering; the science bits focused on lasers and glaciers, and the software bits walked people through my stack, especially non-trivial PDAL pipelines. Key parts of my stack are:

• PDAL: of course
• cpd-rs: a Rust implementation of the Coherent Point Drift point set registration algorithm
• GMT: batch maps
• oh so much more...

I couldn't help but be impressed by how nice everyone was at FOSS4GNA! Compared to academic or DOD conferences, this conference was almost devoid of those who felt the need to prove just how smart they were as soon as you met them. Everyone was friendly, interested in what you were doing, and generally there just to have a good time and learn. How refreshing.

The conference was disappointingly short of people of color and women; my eyeball estimate was at least 70% male, and vanishingly small percentage of PoC. We can must do better.