https://amercader.net/blog/ Recent content in Blogs on Adrià Mercader Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/2025/ Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/2025/ Jump to: Reading | Traveling | Running | Working I’ve been slacking off on these yearly updates for a while, but this year I have a bit more time in my hands (more on this later), so here we go. Overall, 2025… Fine, I guess. I can’t complain on any of the important fronts, and I feel very grateful for that, but it has felt like a long year. It’s hard not to feel deflated at times because of the whole …[gestures at everything], and to be honest I reached the end of the year with low energy levels. https://amercader.net/blog/new-job/ Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/new-job/ I got a new job! It’s a good one, I’ve been very lucky. Last week I joined Link Digital, one of the key members of the CKAN ecosystem, where I’ll be able to focus most of my time in the development and maintenance of CKAN itself. This means not only scoping and developing new features, but also improving processes, automating maintenance stuff, reducing technical debt, etc. The sort of thing that is both really important for a healthy open source project but also unlikely to attract contributions. https://amercader.net/blog/exploring-ml-features-in-ckan-part-2/ Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/exploring-ml-features-in-ckan-part-2/ This is the second part in a series of posts exploring how to integrate Machine Learning functionalities into data catalogs. You might want to check the first part in which we introduce what embeddings are: Part 1: Introducing Machine Learning Embeddings In this post I’ll explain how I integrated embeddings into a CKAN extension to provide useful features for users. I’ve been working on this GitHub repository, which you are of course free to extend and use as a starting point but note that this is in no way ready for production: https://amercader.net/blog/exploring-ml-features-in-ckan-part-1/ Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/exploring-ml-features-in-ckan-part-1/ If you cut across all the tiresome hype and snake oil marketing that surrounds the AI / Machine Learning field you can find valuable techniques that can provide value to software projects. This is especially true for those that revolve around data sharing and publication like data catalogs. They are (generally) well-structured repositories of (hopefully) publicly available data described by (one would hope) comprehensive dataset metadata, all good ingredients to apply to ML processes. https://amercader.net/blog/new-adventures/ Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/new-adventures/ Next week will be my last one working at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It still feels weird to write it down or say it out loud, it’s been almost 13 years after all! But it’s time to move on and I’m ready for whatever is coming next. What I take from all these years is overwhelmingly positive. I was hired as a software developer thanks to having a particular set of skills (having worked with the Pylons web framework and spatial stuff like PostGIS or WMS) but quickly found out that the job wasn’t like any of my previous ones. https://amercader.net/blog/ckanext-spatial-map-providers/ Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/ckanext-spatial-map-providers/ A new version of ckanext-spatial (2.1.0) was released this week. Besides the usual gracious contributions from community members and some cleanups to drop support for Python 2 and an old search backend, the main change included in this release is an improved way of configuring the background tiles for map widgets. A while ago, users of the extension might have seen the following message popping up in their maps: After many years of being a popular choice as a tile map provider, Stamen stopped providing their tiles as a public service. https://amercader.net/blog/quanesfesta.cat/ Sun, 26 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/quanesfesta.cat/ (Jump to the English version below) El que necessitava era prou senzill: Com puc afegir les festes laborals a Catalunya (incloent les festes locals) al meu calendari des d’un lloc oficial? Malauradament, una tasca simple com aquesta no sembla que sigui possible. Les pàgines disponibles des de la Generalitat ofereixen una experiència molt pobra: Calendari laboral 2023: les festes només són disponibles com una llista de text o una imatge, no hi opció de descarregar el calendari com a ICS o com a taula. https://amercader.net/blog/til-alpine-linux-does-not-ship-bash/ Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/til-alpine-linux-does-not-ship-bash/ This is a bit embarrassing but I’ll post it anyway in case it helps somebody out there having a slow day (or myself from the future who might forget it). I was recently upgrading a Dockerfile from Alpine Linux version 3.13 to version 3.16. The Dockerfile is fairly straightforward, installing a bunch of system packages, then Python ones and copying some initialization scripts. One of these scripts is the entrypoint script defined in CMD: https://amercader.net/blog/2021/ Sun, 09 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/2021/ Jump to: Traveling | Reading | Running | Working Another year flew by! This one really felt like it passed extremely fast. There were no major events or disruptions, just the ebbs and flows of daily life. Luckily we’ve all been healthy except for regular non-Covid stuff. Hope that is the case on your end too. Like the previous year, no international travel in 2021. Countless virtual work meetings all around the world, but no work trips yet. https://amercader.net/blog/munibot-news/ Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/munibot-news/ Here’s a news roundup from the Munibot front, everybody’s favourite Twitter geo bots. About a month ago @munibot_cat, the smallest of the current bots, finished its journey across the 948 Catalan municipalities. It took just under a year and along the way it gathered a small but loyal group of followers. Its bigger brother @munibot_es carries on, having just surpassed a quarter of all municipalities visited. Well done, @munibot_cat https://amercader.net/blog/casual-openstreetmapping/ Fri, 13 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/casual-openstreetmapping/ Records show that I joined OpenStreetMap back in 2008, but I never was a very active contributor. Back then there wasn’t widely available imagery appropriately licensed to trace things on, and the tools and conventions to be used were cryptic and felt for the initiated only. JOSM looked scary and the friendlier iD editor didn’t exist yet. Fast forward a decade and, not surprisingly, things have changed a lot. To the point that I’ve found myself editing the map semi-regularly for the last month, which has brought me to a whooping #154 in the OSM rank for Spain (according to this site). https://amercader.net/blog/munibot-maps/ Sat, 26 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/munibot-maps/ For the past six months the Munibot crew has been humming along, regularly tweeting beautiful imagery of Spanish and Catalan municipalities. The two original bots were later joined by their French counterpart, with the much more monumental task of going over the almost 35.000 communes of France. Over time, I got curious about how many tweets had been published and how many were left, or wondered if a particular municipality had been tweeted or not. https://amercader.net/blog/replacing-ckan-web-framework/ Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/replacing-ckan-web-framework/ A couple of weeks ago I submitted a pull request to the main CKAN repo, which was promptly reviewed and merged by my tech team colleague Sergey. On the surface it looks fairly unremarkable, just cleaning up some old code and some tests no longer used. But this code has played a critical role in making possible one of the most important milestones in CKAN’s history, its migration to Flask and support for Python 3. https://amercader.net/blog/2020/ Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/2020/ Jump to: Traveling | Reading | Running | Working The Three Kings brought some presents last night, finally bringing the Christmas holidays to their end in this part of the world. It’s time to look back at the year that just ended and, well, what can I say? It sucked. While we are lucky that Covid didn’t take anyone from our close circle of family and friends, it has shaped our lives for most of the year, in the same way it has shaped them for most people around the world. https://amercader.net/blog/munibot-the-friendly-geo-twitter-bot/ Sat, 26 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/munibot-the-friendly-geo-twitter-bot/ I wrote Munibot, a small Twitter bot that tweets aerial imagery of municipalities (or any other administrative region). Its current two incarnations are @munibot_es and @munibot_cat, sending regular images of municipalities in Spain and Catalonia respectively: Original tweet Of course it is open source and you can easily customize it to run your own. The source and documentation is on GitHub. I was originally inspired by @everytract, which shows all US Census Tracts in order, and while working on it I also found out about a more recent colleague, @everypostcode. https://amercader.net/blog/beware-of-json-fields-in-sqlalchemy/ Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/beware-of-json-fields-in-sqlalchemy/ PostgreSQL JSON fields are a really convenient way of storing structured data alongside traditional row / column values. They avoid the need to create extra tables and relationships and when properly set up they can perform really well for a lot of use cases. SQLAlchemy supports JSON fields natively so you can easily add support for them in your ORM models. There is one thing that has bitten me a couple of times before and is definitely worth knowing about JSON fields and SQLAlchemy though, and that is how changes are detected (or as SQLAlchemy puts it, “mutation tracking”). https://amercader.net/blog/im-here/ Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/im-here/ Our youngest son is at that magical stage when his speaking is really starting to pick up. In a short period of time he has started to use more and more new words, combining different ones and expressing more complex concepts. There has been something he learnt recently though that really stuck with me. Soc aquí Literally, “I’m here”. What’s special is that he won’t say it as an answer for us wondering where he is. https://amercader.net/blog/2019/ Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/2019/ Jump to: Reading | Traveling | Running | Working The year is ending so it’s time to look back. 2019 has been an intense year and overall I’m happy with what it brought. I’m definitely happy with where I’m ending it, up in the Pyrenees, close to the Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park. It has been the second full year since we moved back to Tarragona from the UK and we have fully settled to the rhythms of the place. https://amercader.net/blog/podcasts/ Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/podcasts/ I’ve been listening to podcasts pretty frequently for some years now, but I wouldn’t say I’m an avid consumer of them. I can’t listen to music or podcasts while working (unless it is really mechanical stuff) so I mostly do it while running or driving. I use my phone for this and from the beginning I was a happy user of Podcatcher Deluxe as it was simple and did exactly what I needed from it: allowed to add new podcasts via RSS, download episodes on the device and remembered the point when I last stopped listening. https://amercader.net/blog/writing-again/ Sat, 23 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/writing-again/ Well here we are. This will be my first post in *checks archive* … almost 7 years so I guess better late than never. The first version of my website, which I put together back in 2010, did have a blog where I posted fairly occasionally. I did enjoy putting posts together but as it often happens I started to put it off more and more until they became rarer and rarer. https://amercader.net/blog/mapping-library-closures-a-tale-of-budget-cuts-civic-hacking-and-opendata/ Sun, 27 Jan 2013 15:35:52 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/mapping-library-closures-a-tale-of-budget-cuts-civic-hacking-and-opendata/ First things first, Newcastle City Council plans to close down 10 libraries across the city as part of a wider series of budget cuts. This represents the closure of more than half of all existing branches and will cause considerable harm, apart from being just silly. If you are concerned about it, head to SaveNewcastleLibraries.org to find ways to get involved, or click on the image below to open a map showing the location of the planned closures, as well as the contact details for their local councillors. https://amercader.net/blog/import-runkeeper-data-to-postgis-and-visualize-it-with-torque/ Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:56:16 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/import-runkeeper-data-to-postgis-and-visualize-it-with-torque/ After a long day in front of your laptop or just to think of a fresh approach to that annoying bug, what’s better than going for a run? There are amazing examples out there of the kind of stuff you can do with your running data, and more and more readily available data visualization tools open a lot of possibilities. To make easier to get started hacking with your running data to those of you who use RunKeeper (and to celebrate PostGIS day! https://amercader.net/blog/openlayers-cookbook-review/ Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:54:21 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/openlayers-cookbook-review/ I finally managed to set aside some time to read OpenLayers Cookbook, written by Antonio Santiago. Antonio is a great developer (you should definitely check his blog for some cool spatial development stuff) and a really nice guy, so I was looking forward to see how the book had turned up. As the rest of the Packt Cookbook series, the book is based on increasingly complex small code “recipes” that focus on a particular aspect of OpenLayers development. https://amercader.net/blog/around-the-world-in-80-wikipedia-articles/ Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:03:53 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/around-the-world-in-80-wikipedia-articles/ (For the eager ones, I’ve written a new version of WikiGeoLinks with Leaflet and Bootstrap. It lets you discover interactively how the georeferenced articles of the Wikipedia are connected. If you want the long story, scroll down…) Click to enlarge I’m sure one of the most common ways in which people use Wikipedia is jumping to different articles from the original one they were checking in the first place. At least that’s how I spent most of the time on it, getting dragged into interesting stuff. https://amercader.net/blog/2011-wrap-up/ Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:45:23 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/2011-wrap-up/ Let’s be completely honest, we all knew it was going to happen. You start a new blog (maybe you’ve even built the engine yourself), add some enthusiastic new posts, start publishing fairly regularly… And then at some point you start procrastinating a bit, telling yourself that next weekend you are going to write about this new thing you’ve found and without knowing it has been eight months since your last post. https://amercader.net/blog/exploding-multigeometries-with-postgis/ Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:11:29 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/exploding-multigeometries-with-postgis/ I recently needed a bit of geoprocessing for which PostGIS turned out to be the perfect tool. I’ll share my findings in case they are useful to somebody. But first of all, here goes some context: I had imported the countries dataset from Natural Earth to PostGIS (piece of cake with ogr2ogr), and I needed to obtain the extent or bounding box of each country. Getting the extents The most obvious choice seemed ST_Extent, but there is a better choice: ST_Envelope. https://amercader.net/blog/a-nice-video-about-open-government-data/ Sun, 17 Apr 2011 10:34:10 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/a-nice-video-about-open-government-data/ Here is a really nice video produced by the Open Knowledge Foundation introducing Open Government Data. ( {"base_state": {"language": "ca"}, "video_url": "http://vimeo.com/21711338"} ) Notice the subtitles options below the video. It is using Universal Subtitles, an online service that makes really easy to add or edit subtitles to existing videos. I helped creating the Catalan version of the subtitles and found it a brilliant idea. You can edit the translations on site or download the file and upload the changes. https://amercader.net/blog/europeana-hackathon/ Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:30:45 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/europeana-hackathon/ The past Friday and Saturday took place in Hilversum, near Amsterdam, the first Europeana Hackathon. Europeana is a project funded by the European Comission that aggregates cultural content from organizations across Europe. It hosts around 16 million records, and the variety of stuff you can find on it is incredible, from ancient maps to fashion clogs to dolls sitting on a monkey. The team behind Europeana has recently published a preliminary beta version of an API, and the objectives of the Hackathon were both receiving feedback from developers and see what they could came up with after playing with it. https://amercader.net/blog/does-the-world-need-another-blog/ Wed, 30 Mar 2011 18:25:04 +0000 https://amercader.net/blog/does-the-world-need-another-blog/ Probably not. Some say blogs are not cool any more (i.e. they are “dead”), left behind by the frantic pace of Twitter and Facebook. News and ideas are more and more condensed to fit the sacred 140 characters, and they become outdated sooner than ever before. I use Twitter and Facebook daily, but I still found the most interesting and useful resources reading blogs. I value the effort the authors (at least some of them) put into presenting their ideas and knowledge.