go with what you have

Back when I was just starting out in my career I worked for a small company of consultants. This was in the mid-90s and we still weren’t fully digital.  My main job was creating maps.  Maps of rivers, maps of forests, maps of roads.  Just all sorts of maps.

Since we weren’t that big we couldn’t afford the fancy mapping software of the day.  Some software packages ran up to $25000 and had $5000 a year maintenance fees.  Nothing that my bosses were eager to pay.  So we did what we could.  I would first hand draw all the maps from paper satellite images and then laboriously digitize these lines on a digital drafting tablet using some cheap $99 software package my boss had bought out of the back of some trade magazine.

I would then hand encode each and every line using the USGS Digital Line standards guide.  A phone book sized book of codes and categories.

Once all of this was done I would turn over a floppy disk over to our computer specialist who was coding and refining his own homemade mapping software and after countless edits and hours and hours of misery we would end up with a digital computer file like one generated by an expensive software package.

So what’s the benefit?  I mean other than saving money which in and of itself isn’t the most compelling reason.  I mean you could easily bake in the costs of new software into the project budgets and get yourself the new software over time.

I found later on in my career that having to do these things by hand and really delving deep into the esoteric issues of codes and hand digitizing that I got a better appreciation for data quality and for resolving issues with data from other parties.

Whereas before if I had a problem with data I would have to go through files line by line to find a glitch, after a while I developed a sense of what the problem was with a piece of data and how to resolve it.  Something that I probably would not appreciate if I would have had access to the fancy software package.

Using the tools at hand makes you more resourceful.  It allows you to get a more technical feel for the processes and the practices that govern your field, whatever that may be.

I am totally for working with the best of equipment, the best people, and the best established practices but I also think there is a lot to be said for making do with what you have and having to be creative to engineer a solution for yourself.

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