User:Rburhum

Ragi Yaser Burhum


Contact Information and Social Network profiles

Ragi was born and raised in Perú and currently lives in San Francisco.

He worked at ESRI's Professional Service group (creating production solutions for National Geographic, NGA, UKHO, etc) and later moved to ESRI's GeoDatabase group where he designed/coded/debugged the code related to versioning, editing behavior, spatial caches etc. After 7 years of this, he moved to Microsoft to work in games (Microsoft Flight Simulator). Not adjusting to life in Redmond, he decided to scratch an entrepreneurship itch he had always had. He decided to move to the Bay Area to learn more about startups in Silicon Valley. He immediately fell in love with the startup community.

Along the way, Ragi ran a successful GIS software consulting company that specialized in combining ESRI and Open Source software stacks and founded a venture-backed luxury fashion startup (yes, nothing to do with geo!). He is currently working in the latest venture he founded (a mobile-based - iOS/Android - mapping application framework / service).

Ragi has contributed to GDAL (creator of ArcObjects / FileGDB driver) as well as sprinkled patches throughout some of OSGeo's sponsored projects.

He is also an active member of the OSGeo CA chapter where he sometimes hosts, helps coordinate meetings for the chapter, or helps with the participation of the chapter in various Bay Area events.

In addition, he currently runs the most successful Meetup related to geospatial technologies in the world: the GeoMeetup. Every meeting gathers 100+ people that come from various companies in the Bay Area (Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, etc) as well as non-profit organizations.

When time allows, he speaks at different conferences about various topics to raise awareness about OSGeo - event if it means having to carry, setup, teardown and sit at the booth all day (what better way to raise awareness about FOSS4G while fixing bugs) :)


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