Big Data In The Browser

So why would anyone want to put alot of data into a browser? Well, for a lot of the same reasons that edge computing and distributed computing have become so popular.
You get the data a lot closer to the user and you don’t have to pay for the compute ;)
… this sounds great but as I found out during this conversation it's not as easy as it might seem!
There are a lot of trade-offs that need to be evaluated when moving data and analytics to the client.
Nick Rabinowitz ( / nrabinowitz ) Senior Staff Software Engineer at Foursquare has a ton of experience with this so he volunteered his time to help us understand more about it.
location.foursquare.com/
studio.foursquare.com/home
If you are not familiar with the Arrow data format (arrow.apache.org/) it might be worth checking out
Apache Arrow defines a language-independent columnar memory format for flat and hierarchical data, organized for efficient analytic operations on modern hardware like CPUs and GPUs. The Arrow memory format also supports zero-copy reads for lightning-fast data access without serialization overhead
Related podcast episodes that you might find interesting include
H3 grid system
mapscaping.com/podcast/h3-geo...
The H3 geospatial indexing system is a discrete global grid system consisting of a multi-precision hexagonal tiling of the sphere with hierarchical indexes. H3 is a really interesting approach to tiling data that was developed by UBER and has been open-sourced.
Hex Tiles
mapscaping.com/podcast/hex-ti...
If you have not heard of the H3 grid system before listen to that episode first before listening to this one it will add a lot of useful context!
Spatial Knowledge Graphs
mapscaping.com/podcast/spatia...
Foursquare is moving away from spatial joins and focusing on building a knowledge graph. If you are not familiar with graphs this might be a good place to start, also its interesting to hear the reasons for the move from spatial joins to another data structure.
Distribution Geospatial Data
mapscaping.com/podcast/distri...
This is interesting if you want to understand more about distributed databases and some of the strategies for doing this. It sounds complicated but this episode is a really good introduction!
Cloud Native Geospatial
mapscaping.com/podcast/cloud-...
This episode give a solid overview of what cloud-native means and some of the current geospatial cloud native formats out there today
I am constantly thinking about how I can make this podcast better for you so if you have any ideas or suggestions please let me know!
Also, I am thinking of recording a behind-the-scenes episode, is that something you might be interested in? if so what questions do you have?
Some more episodes you might enjoy
ESRI (mapscaping.podbean.com/) , GIS careers (mapscaping.com/podcasts/) , Geospatial Data Science (mapscaping.com/podcasts/)
QGIS (mapscaping.com/podcasts/) , Geospatial Python (mapscaping.com/podcasts/) , ArcGIS Pro (mapscaping.com/podcasts/)
Google Maps (mapscaping.com/podcasts/) , Geomatics (mapscaping.com/podcasts/) , Cartography (mapscaping.com/podcasts/)
Location Intelligence (mapscaping.com/podcasts/) , Mapping (mapscaping.com/podcasts/)