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What a year! Because of Covid/the Corona Virus/The Rona, the UC this year unfortunately was virtual.  I was super sad about this.  The UC is a fantastic reminder that I have a seriously cool job.  Being able to attend the UC in person, you are overwhelmed with people from around the world that also do GIS, which is a stark contrast to doing GIS in Utah and being one of very few. That being said, ESRI did a FANTASTIC job with the UC! Being virtual, I had ZERO issues with connecting to classes, listening to speakers, I never lost a connection or was kicked out or had lagging issues, and that is a huge feat! So, great job! Because it was virtual, there were only a handful of class offerings each  hour, and all from ESRI staff.  They also split the plenary sessions into one hour segments each day, instead of all day Monday.  I think that was a great idea. So Monday started with the Plenary.  There were over 80,000 people attending virtually! From aroun...

I started with a class about operations dashboard.  They showed an interesting example of how it was used for superbowl security, and also by UPS and FedEx.  There are 4 different ways to create a new dashboard. Dashboards can use maps bookmarks.  You can create pie charts, but also manipulate the inner radius to create a donut.  You can create hover labels.  You can stack elements, create tabs, add pulse/pan actions (movements) connect charts to maps, can add filters to affect maps/charts, you can create your own url parameters, use dashboards in storymaps, and it now works on smartphones. Dashboards were purposely built for presentations.  They are working on adding arcade, 3D capabilities, and layout improvements.             I went to a class on ArcGIS Monitor, but it was super boring and ridiculously expensive. And also their projector was SERIOUSLY wigging out, so I could not watch.  It's 10...

On my way to my first class, I saw a cartography genius on the escalator, and had a total fan girl moment. My first class was GIS for Active Shooter Response.  The class was PACKED.  It ended up being nothing that I had hoped, and only a grad student's project on FBI stats.  I could not leave to go to a different class.  So here are some random facts - there have been 277 mass shootings between 2000-2018.  California has had the most.  The least occurrences in less populated states.  No correlation for seasons, ccw/armed households.  7 states do mental health background checks.  Did not compare to gun-free zones. This class time was shared with a GIS person from a city in California that showed her project that took her two years.  Basic aerial with building outlines.  For schools.  Oh. Man. I decided I need to present next year. I apprehensively followed up that class with a class on GIS for Informed Decisio...

Day 2, diving right in. I started with an Arcade class.  Arcade is not a programming language.  It is not a replacement for python.  It is an expression language that can be used across all ESRI products.  It is not case sensitive.    TextFormatting.Newline - AGO does not support.  Boo....seriously, make things work everywhere before releasing!    The presenter recommended a book available on Amazon called "Writing Arcade Expressions" by Dave Allen.    My coworker and I met with some ESRI staff in the vendor area to discuss some problems we've been running into, and to get some help.  We discussed using a base64 encoded string for pictures in pop-ups (they didn't know how to do this), related tables in pop ups (no real way to do this with truly live data), vector tile packages to get our data out to custom apps, and how in the world are we getting duplicate global ids in globalid fields??  I also aske...

ESRI UC 2019! This was an exciting trip, as I haven't been to this conference in five years.  It was fun to see how much it has grown. After checking in, I stopped by the bookstore to look at the swag.  I learned we are now map ninjas.                                   Barf                               Monday is the notorious Plenary Session.  ALL. DAY.  Everyone sitting in the same room, listening to presenters from all over the world, show off what they've made, intermixed with upcoming release news from ESRI staff. The man, the myth, the legend. The founder, Jack Dangermond, spoke a lot.  He announced the theme: GIS as a nervous system.  He said his favorite thing is story maps.  To date, there are over 1 million story maps, with over 3000 new story maps creat...