Written by: Savannah Ostrowski This past weekend a few of us (Stephen, Daniel, and Savannah) mentored the MapHacks hackathon at the University of Washington, organized by the University’s Department of Geography and sponsored by Critigen. Photo credits: Utako Kase If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a hackathon, rest assured...

Our bread and butter here at SpatialDev is designing and developing powerful data visualization and analytics tools that support sustainable social and economic development around the world. We use geospatial data and mapping technology combined with user-friendly spatial data visualization applications to create tools that are used by organizations around...

A new era of modern JavaScript frameworks has taken the web by storm - and the developers at SpatialDev are taking notice. Just two years ago, our developers got together and decided that AngularJS would be our preferred JavaScript framework of choice. At the time, many in the open-source community...

While most of us here in Ballard, Seattle are still getting over our food coma from last weekend’s Seafood Fest, we wanted to take a moment to showcase a brief case study on data-driven design. For the past 3 years, SpatialDev has teamed up with Ballard Alliance to create the...

There are several benefits to leveraging private sub-networks as part of your deployment infrastructure. We work with AWS, so I’ll speak to that specifically. Servers launched in private sub-networks have no public IP address, so they may be less prone to attack. They also maintain their private IP address even...

Last week, Seattle hosted its first Tech Ladies* meetup at Ada’s Technical Books and Cafe. Throughout the evening, I spoke to women working across multiple industries in a variety of roles including software developers, project managers, data experts, and security analysts. Some of the evening’s discussions included: Data security and...

When it comes to deploying software, our job as consultants is to ensure reliability, consistency, and security for our clients. Our general approach to addressing these grand tasks is to leverage existing open-source technologies. We recently discovered two open source tools than can help strengthen the security of our Node.js...

If you are using Mocha for Node.js testing than you may be familiar with the before() and beforeAll() functions. The former is designed to run once per describe block (regardless of how many tests the block contains), while the latter runs once before every test within the describe block. See...

Last week, Kim and I traveled to Ethiopia to visit our partners at the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) in Addis Ababa. For the past two years, SpatialDev and ATA teamed up to create a suite of software tools, built to enhance survey collection and visualization. The Visual Institutional Survey and...

SpatialDev is very excited about the launch of the new (To) app (available in the App Store). (To) enlisted the help of SpatialDev to be their technology partner in building this app. (To) puts powerful location tools in the hands of those facing life transitions, where location is the driver...