I was fortunate to attend the 2019 Esri DevSummit in March. This year there was definitely loads of interest as seen by what I thought was a record crowd… case in point, the plenary session was packed and standing room only! For me, at devSummit I like to focus on all the “what’s new” and “what’s coming” sessions, however, this year there was plenty to see from sessions that shared innovative ways for developers and non-developers to use ArcGIS technology to build, deploy, and share awesome GIS web maps, web apps, and services.
Just this week I was asked in a Geohipster interview, “You were just at the Esri Developer Summit. Tell us something you learned there that you don’t think you would have heard about otherwise.” For this I responded as follows:
I think, overall, I was most struck by how the products are [finally] coming into alignment and offering a similar experience for the user. I’m far from an ArcGIS Pro “guru”, however, curiosity always does get the best of me so I really do like to dabble, test, and try to break new technologies as they come out. I’m also fortunate in that I’ve had access to the software courtesy of Esri and some of the companies I’ve worked for — Esri also does make available software for non-commercial use to developers as well, so this is a great way to access the tools. But back to where I started, I was impressed with what’s coming from the Story Map technology, Web AppBuilder and Survey123. Esri has evolved these solutions using a new architecture and is providing the same, familiar experience which is also very simple to use and can also be very useful to those of us (like me) who don’t code. I really like what I’ve seen recently and I think the users will as well. As an example, I chatted with a Survey123 staffer at the show and he walked me through creating a form and publishing out as a mobile app and feature service. The scenario was a tree inspection app and it took us about 10 minutes in total to create — I was pretty impressed!
Bonus… I was treated to 5 minutes one on one learning about Cartography from Esri’s Kenneth Field, that was awesome!
You can learn more about DevSummit at https://www.esri.com/en-us/about/events/devsummit/overview and to catch my entire Geohipster interview see HERE
This was the 2019 @esri #devsummit #geogeeksinthesun pic.twitter.com/DA6ML2Nv2F
— Glenn Letham (@gletham) March 11, 2019