Three weeks ago, some of our Higher Education staff from Esri Canada’s Education and Research team had the opportunity to attend the Esri DevSummit in Palm Springs. A few members of the ECCE program from COGS and McMaster were also able to take advantage of the free registration, including two of our own ECCE student associates. With over two hundred technical sessions and demos, and direct access to Esri’s own development teams in the main showcase, this was a great chance for all of us to focus on learning about the latest technologies and trends with the ArcGIS platform.

One of the themes that seems to be gaining a great deal of attention surrounds big data and real-time data (or the ‘Internet of Things’), which tend to be closely related concerns. Dealing with streams of real-time data can quickly generate ‘big data’, which in turn requires different tools and techniques for analysis and visualization. For these, the tools of choice from the ArcGIS platform are GeoEvent Server and GeoAnalytics Server. Numerous sessions at the Dev Summit presented the capabilities of both GeoEvent Server and GeoAnalytics Server. Here are a couple examples included in the top 20 videos posted shortly after the Dev Summit concluded:

Another theme that seems to be emerging is the use of TypeScript for developing web applications. One of the top 20 videos, for example, focuses on Using TypeScript with ArcGIS API for JavaScript. TypeScript is being adopted by popular frameworks, such as Dojo and Angular, and increasingly is a popular choice for developing web applications – for example, the ArcGIS API for JavaScript is itself built using TypeScript.

Beyond the technical sessions, we’re proud to announce all of our teams representing Esri Canada this year successfully reached the 2nd round of the annual Dev Summit dodgeball tournament (the team that included our McMaster ECCE Student associates actually fared a little better, and reached the 3rd round). We will be sure to hone our skills for next year, and hopefully will be able to boost our ranks with a few more ECCE Student associates.

For anyone who was unable to attend the Dev Summit, you can access the recently published playlists that provide recordings from all of the Tech Sessions and Demo Theater presentations.