Today, we are excited to launch the new Esri Software Engineering Blog. This platform will offer behind-the-scenes stories and insights from our engineering teams.
The blog is designed to be a place where Esri engineers share their work, processes, and the architecture that makes ArcGIS work. In addition to covering technical aspects, the blog will also provide insights into how Esri engineers collaborate and evolve as a team, sharing experiences on their growth and development.
Why a new blog
We believe that an engineering blog is a valuable new addition for several reasons:
- Expertise: We bring extensive experience in developing GIS software.
- User insights: Millions of users across diverse use cases have been engaged with our solutions.
- Technical depth: Significant R&D investments have been made, and the blog will explore the technical details and reasoning behind our findings.
- Engineering talent: With hundreds of engineers whose entire careers have been spent working with geospatial technology, our team represents some of the top minds in geospatial engineering.
- Centralization: Previously, similar content was scattered. This blog will centralize these insights, making them more accessible.
What’s different from other Esri Blogs
Unlike the ArcGIS Blog, which focuses on feature use, release announcements, or user stories, our engineering blog will concentrate on the technical aspects and the inner workings of our engineering teams.
Expected topics
In this blog, we will write about technical stories and insights from all our technologies, not just those for developers. This will give a complete view of the engineering efforts that drive Esri’s innovations.
In the engineering blog, expect to find articles on a range of topics, including:
- Software development: what technical challenges we face, how we solve them, how and why we make some technical decisions, and implementation strategies we use.
- Team dynamics: what dynamics and work processes we apply, and how our teams collaborate and contribute with organizations defining new standards.
- User research: how our engineering teams work closely with our users to better understand their needs, motivations, pains, etc.
- User and developer experience: how we design and test our products, documentation, SDKs, and certifications to provide a great experience.
- Performance: how we optimize our products’ speed, efficiency, and performance.
- Infrastructure: how we design the architecture of our systems, use virtualization and cloud services to make our technologies scalable, stable, and efficient.
- Data engineering: data modeling challenges, standardization of data sources, ETL processes we implement, mass data workflows, and data pipelining.
- Security and privacy: technical challenges we face to ensure we meet compliance requirements, and how we address cybersecurity and data protection.
- Testing & QA: how we apply software testing, quality assurance, test automation, and other techniques to ensure software quality.
- Accessibility: challenges of implementing accessibility into geospatial apps and how we approach accessibility for our apps, SDKs, websites, and documentation.
- Esri people and culture: how we facilitate career development, leadership, and the actions we take to contribute to the technical ecosystem.
- And other topics that will continue to emerge
Final thoughts
We hope you find the knowledge and experiences our engineering teams share in this new blog as interesting as the enthusiasm and pride with which we present them.
We also hope this blog reflects our commitment to innovation and helps you gain a deeper understanding of the technical decisions made by our engineering teams that are shaping the future of Esri and ArcGIS.
If any of our open opportunities align with your background, goals, and motivations, we encourage you to apply.
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