pdxmele

Hello world!

Welcome to my humble home page. I'm Mele Sax-Barnett, and I'm a Technical Support Engineer at Urban Airship. I'm also helping out a bit with location projects there. I formerly worked as a GIS Technician at TriMet, where I assisted in the creation of the new Map Trip Planner, an open source multi-modal trip planner built with OpenTripPlanner. You can generally find me learning a new programming language, editing OpenStreetMap, making web maps for fun and (non)profit(s), doing yoga, or riding one of my bikes around Portland, OR.

Side projects

A mobile-friendly simple PDX bike map viewer powered by OpenStreetMap data that uses my map tiles below. Find out how to make your own by checking out the README here.
An updated version of my CivicApps-award-winning Portland Bike to Transit Map
Some nifty neon-colored PDX bike route map tiles [retina version] that I made with TileMill and MapBox
The same Portland-area bike route tiles [retina version], with a MapBox streets + terrain background
See more of what I've been working on by checking out my GitHub user page

Stuff I heart

Quantum GIS: an increasingly awesome open-source alternative to ArcGIS
PostgreSQL with PostGIS: spatially enabled database system that can also do many spatial analysis + data processing tasks quickly and easily with SQL
OpenGeo: origin of PostGIS, OpenLayers, GeoServer, and other great stuff
CartoDB: PostGIS in the cloud that you can access and control with web apps
PDX OSGEO: The Portland open source geospatial software user group
OR URISA Young Professionals

Code Scouts, an awesome new nonprofit aimed at helping more women learn to code
My friends at PyLadies PDX and the Portland Python User Group
Codecademy: a great way to start learning to code

BikePortland - all the PDX bike news that's fit to blog
Transit Maps Tumblr: so many pretty maps!
And finally, my pretty cool husband's webpage :)

OpenStreetMap tools

How did you contribute to OSM? and Where did you contribute to OSM?
Keep right: helps you spot common errors
ITO World OSM Tools: great for tracking changes, visualization

Presentations (with partners)

Part two of a beginning OpenStreetMap/Leaflet Workshop I led at NACIS 2012 and GIS in Action 2013 with Grant Humphries and Wm Leler, who led part one (his slides here)
Exploring Open Source GIS Programming, delivered to a GIS Programming class at PSU with members of the WPC/Oregon Walks GIS Jam
Presentations at State of the Map US 2012 (the OpenStreetMap conference) with Grant Humphries:
- TriMet's OpenStreetMap Improvement Project for OpenTripPlanner
- The State of the Portland Map