09-10, 11:00–11:30 (America/Chicago), Grand F
Software engineers from the NYC Department of City Planning will discuss the FOSS4G they are using to build modern public-facing full stack web applications that deliver on agency priorities and obligations to the public.
The Application Engineering team within the IT Division of the NYC Department of City Planning builds and maintains a suite of full stack web-based geospatial applications including ZoLa, Population FactFinder, and the Equitable Development Data Explorer. Over the past year, we have done extensive work to identify what OSS we should use to build these applications going forward. This process has included replacing parts of our stack, reaffirming choices that have served us well, and eliminating vendor dependencies where possible. Our applications include everything from relational databases, to APIs, to Javascript UI and GIS frameworks. After much R&D and proofs-of-concept, we are currently building a new product that will empower the public to view and understand capital spending in New York City. Releasing this fall, this new application will be the first to put many of our new technology choices into practice.
In this talk, we will show how an internal software engineering team within government can build custom, full stack applications on a FOSS stack that satisfy our agency's business needs and obligations to the public. We will show the OSS libraries and frameworks we used at various layers of the application, with particular focus on those concerned with geospatial functionality. On the back end, we will talk about how we use technology such as GDAL and PostGIS to transform and store open data sets for use by our APIs. On the front end, we will show how frameworks such as Maplibre and Deck.gl allow us to be build robust web interfaces that integrate with general-purpose frameworks like React. In addition to discussing specific FOSS, we will touch on the principles and best practices that guide our choices, talk about lessons learned, and identify areas where we are still learning.
A team like ours simply could not exist without the countless FOSS tools and libraries that allow us to build software at scale while avoiding vendor lock-in. Through this talk, we hope to show FOSS maintainers and contributors how we are using their software to meet our agency's needs and inspire others within government to do the same.
