This past Monday we gave an introductory workshop on PostGIS. Our slides are here: PostGIS tutorial. Overall the event was very educational. I did have a butterfly feeling through out since we were the last to speak.
Talk slides
Talks were good, but most of the topics were not new to me so harder to appreciate. The talk I thought was the best was given by Steve Gifford on Geospatial on Mobile. Two things I liked about this talk was it was a topic I didn't know much about (developing native 3D globe map apps for iOS and Android) and Steve was a very funny speaker. That kind of funniness that looks unplanned and natural. I wish it had a bit more Android content in it though. The full list of talks and associated slides below.
Workshops
The workshops I think were the best part of the event. I particularly enjoyed Andrew Hill's CartoDB talk (PostGIS without the pain but with all the fun) mostly because I haven't used CartoDb so first I've seen it in action. Being able to drag and drop a zip file from your local computer or a url of data from some site and have a table ready to query I thought was pretty cool. You could also schedule it to check for updates if it was a url to a shapefile zip or somethng. Of course being able to write raw PostGIS spatial queries and a map app in 5 minutes was pretty slick.
Ours came after, and unfortunately I think it was pretty dry and too technical for most GIS folks. Plus we hadn't told people to download the files before hand so next to impossible to follow along. We should have called it PostGIS with the pain and on a shoestring budget.
