After hitting my ten-year anniversary in August it seemed like a good opportunity to look back on my time at Gaia Resources. We have never been big on job titles; we all have areas of responsibility and get on with whatever needs doing. Officially though, when I started in August 2007 my job title was “Lead Geographic Information Systems Operator” and for the most part Spatial Analyst was my day to day work.

At the time Gaia Resources had four full-time staff and a few casuals and most of the work we were doing was GIS-related. Ten years is an eternity for any tech company but fast forward to today and we have almost twenty staff and most of our work is related to software engineering and much of my day is focused on supervising operations and managing projects.

I’ve trawled through the archives for a few old photos and my short and sweet welcome blog post written by Piers, which made me realise that I look exactly the same as I did when I started at Gaia Resources. Whether that means I looked old then or young now I’ll let others decide.

I think the changes we have seen as a company also mirror what has been happening in the spatial industry as a whole, where tasks have been steadily moving away from GIS Analysts to a more self-service web-based model. This has led to a lot of challenges, but also a lot of new opportunities as spatial information has become more mainstream.

Gaia Resources is a special place to be, with a lot of people that are committed to the work that we do and the impact that it has on the world and that is what has kept me around for ten years, and hopefully another ten.

Feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew