User:Landon Blake

I work as a project land surveyor for a small civil engineering and land surveying company in California's Central Valley. I have been interested in GIS since my first exposure to it during the Land Surveying Program at Flathead Valley Community College, where I was privileged to learn from a great land surveyor and teacher, Dave Dorsett. I was able to learn the basic concepts of GIS with the foresters under the oversight of Bob Beall. My interest in GIS was renewed when I discoverd JUMP, an open source GIS program written in Java by a Canadian company called Vivid Solutions. I decided to teach myself Java so I could improve and customize the program. I later became one of the administrators for OpenJUMP, a fork of the original JUMP that with a more "open" and cooperative development process, and have been working with OpenJUMP ever since.