How did you enjoy the UC - have any takeaways from it?

I only attended the virtual 2021 UC. The workshops I've seen come out of it are invaluable... well, they are probably tangibly valuable to ESRI given they are word-of-mouth ads... other than those, they seem well-made and exciting on the whole.

I'm a single part of GIS community, but I was described as wider at my latest doctor visit - so that's gotta count for something. On a surface level, it's a great entry point for GIS. Maybe even a good learning tool for younger audiences or laymen. The customizability is lacking, which can lead more interested users down a loooooooong rabbit hole (that in turn would lead more invested users to ESRI - or worse, opensource). To the creator's point, that's kind of the appeal behind Felt tho, no? Simplicity. Willing to bet there's a fair amount of opensource tech running on the back end. Exciting to see where it goes. Might be a nice tool to send to my brother for easy learning of the basics.

My brother and I have had an on-going discussion for the past few years on how cool he believes the GIS work can be based on what I've worked on, plus where there's an theoretically small leap from his skillset (SQL/Datamining) to mine (Cartography). Up until recently, my limited purview - not connecting the dots between PostGIS and our discussions - had me saying: "Take a GIS certificate course I guess?" Which would, what, qualify his "GIS" skills for an imagery analyst at best? With a laaaaaaaaaaaaaarge gap between "I know what vector and raster data are (smiley face)" and "I know how to tinker on the dev-end of a WCS," the question has been whether it’s worth it for an early-30s professional with a masters degree to go back to rudimentary technical schooling for the bare-bones basics of anther profession entirely.

Enter: PostGIS. Taking the time off from work to dive deeper into SQL since the progression of learning seems to be “GIS -> PostgreSQL -> PostGIS.” And those are probably medium-level learning curves at best. My hope is I can use this time to learn via Coursera/Udemy, then apply the learnings to some form of passion projects. Either sustainable energy or reviving some of my grad-school projects but taking a different approach.

Don’t know how long this will take, but ideally it will be something to showcase to the next employer(s) long term. Visual warning if you’re on a browser: see second graph. This has been on my mind since reading it (grain of salt given for Medium article). Would venture that me applying my GIS knowledge to spatial SQL vs. my brother applying his SQL knowledge to spatial SQL would net him higher pay/title/etc… curious to see how it will turn out.