Everyone that buys a house or land knows these maps and checks them since the last deadly flood happened a few years ago. I cannot believe that the US decided to defund the offices that help to gather these kind of information.
Those flood maps are common across the first world, sometimes called a "flood overlay" and there is usually also a "bushfire overlay" if you live in Australia. They help describe risk, in the insurance sense, and are presumably used for both insurance and risk management.
of course there are flood maps here in the USA. The Federal government does some survey work, but in the US system, it is the county that is responsible for maintaining basic property and land use maps. Every State in the US is composed of county (or parish or some New England thing to be complete). The US Federal government is not defunding "everything". Also note that some parts of the US do not cooperate very much with the Federal government (mostly near Idaho area, others?). Texas regularly discusses becoming their own country, so of course Texas has its own mapping.
Crucially, the thing they was recently de-funded was not mapping but the federal agency that does hydrology. Hydrology being the science of how water flows in the environment around us.
For example, using GIS data combined with meteorological forecasts, a hydrological model may predict water levels of rivers or flood plains. If nobody is around to run the hydrological model on today’s data, you’re not getting your flood warning today.
For me it is the awareness of your thoughts basically. I had no clue how to do it until I watched the awesome headspace series on Netflix: https://www.headspace.com/netflix
They visualize the concepts really nicely. Check it out if you have no clue what meditation is about.
Reductio ad absurdum: "I should be considered innocent for committing this crime, your honor, as I was unaware of what my thoughts meant at the time as it was not during meditation."
Great questions which I ask my self as well from time to time.
I write without the intend to generate much engagement. But sometimes you are the first to write on a small topic or problem and then people find your site and link it in forums. That definitely feels nice because you see that you are able to help others without much effort.
When I receive emails it is often regarding specific implementation details on my work or stuff that I referenced. Others are just sending a note that they found something really helpful or liked some of my photography.
And then there people who think that you really enjoy solving their problems for them.
In general I like any interaction with anyone who wants to discuss topics that I wrote about. It is not that common that two people have exactly the same problem or have an interest on the same topic AND they make the effort to write an email about it to someone. I learned quite a lot from others this way.
However for my personal peace of mind I never view the Webserver statistics to see the number of page views. I did that in the past but it changed my motivation to be rather extrinsic and my mood to be rather pessimistic. I ditched social media exactly because of this toxic quantification of my personal work. I recommend to you the same because, especially in the beginning, the number of page views that are not yours will be 0. That is something that should not bother you.
For anyone who is interested, here is my small Hugo based site: https://ayeks.de/
I totally feel you. When I joined my current department it was pretty much the same. The engineering team transitioned from Jira to another Jira to a company specific PLM solution, and all formatting of existing docs in the process.
When I was on boarding I had to talk to so many people to get a brief understanding on all processes, tools, etl, deployment methods, APIs and so on. I made some notes on my way and felt the need to share them with the others because everyone was struggling with that topic. The only one source of truth was a 80 page pdf file maintained by one architect.
The solution I went for was markdown docs in Gitlab plus pretty HTML pages generated by mkdocs. The mkdocs material theme is really nice. This has been so successful that we have over 3000 commits after 18 months and over 1000 merge requests to the docs. The main benefits are:
* easy to use, markdown is easier that rst. Especially for non dev people.
* wysiwyg editor in the gitlab webide. Most changes are made in gitlab itself. From change to merge request in 4 clicks without the need to understand git.
* it is just text. In the beginning many people said that they wont contribute anything because the next tool migration will loose everything. But now the docs are in markdown and easily portable.
* gitlab ci automatically lints the changes on every commit so that mkdocs doesn't break because of malformed syntax and broken links. You can only merge to master when the pipeline is green.
* possibility to peer review. We have regulatory requirements for 4 eye principle of some parts, with merge requests we can easily approve and discuss merge requests.
The biggest problem is in my opinion to get our very non technical management onboard. They basically ignore to comment on merge requests or discuss changes in gitlab because it's a developers tool. Therefore they stick to stupid mailing lists and are left out in the process. But everyone from dev to ops, tst, sec is really happy.
It would be nice to have a technical writer maintaining and cleaning up the docs, but there is no budget for that, so it's will probably stay my side job.
Everyone that buys a house or land knows these maps and checks them since the last deadly flood happened a few years ago. I cannot believe that the US decided to defund the offices that help to gather these kind of information.
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