October already? Jeebus.

I'm coordinating a project that we do for the European Commission at work. It's a consortium of 7 parties in 5 European countries, trying to collaborate on one big model, basically. What I expected to happen is that we would do our (relatively small) part in this, figure out how to get it to work in the bigger picture and be done with it.

What is instead happinging at the moment, in no small part because the timeframe for this project is streched out over two years, is lots of bickering over who has to do what. It probably sounds naive, but I did not expect these kinds of politics. My colleague slash mentor has a lot more experience and he assures me it's par for the course. I'd much prefer a normal collaboration based on what's reasonable and fair, but that seems remote at the moment. I'm leaning into my Machiavellian side and am trying to gain leverage over the others, whilst using my colleague as checks and balances. I'm learning on the job, let's put it like that.

Speaking of learning: I just came back from a two-day PostGIS/SQL course. It's very cool to be able to query things in a few lines that would have cost me multiple complex geoprocessing steps with the default tools. I'm hoping I can also start using it as an alternative to my usual Python + Pandas combo for exploring (non-spatial) big datasets.

At the very least I can now finally debate the open source crowd with some experience. I think open source can be great, but there's a special kind of contempt among some people for anything that isn't open source and it's neither rational nor productive.