When you build software for conservation you find a market that's underserved and in some cases just left behind. EarthRanger is meant to help change this by being a practical and affordable tool for protected area management. Working on a small engineering team against a deep backlog requires thoughtful consideration for the tools and technology we use. This post provides a glimpse at one area in EarthRanger where we leverage existing software to quickly deliver customer value.

Project Managers (PMs) at Vulcan work to ensure that projects are on time, under budget and on track towards achieving measurable results. PMs know what a project needs and they make it happen. They identify barriers and work creatively to remove them. They have high-level vision of a project as well as the nitty-gritty details. And while your project’s PM may not have the ABCs and 123s displayed on the whiteboard, all this vital work is actually not so different from managing a classroom.

There's often a desire to use machine learning to augment and improve how areas are monitored for conservation. However, deploying machine learning solutions into the field require more than a good model. The people on the front-lines, those that are doing the monitoring and protecting, need to understand and trust the machine learning model to effectively make use of it. Click to learn more about the lessons learned about creating user interfaces for #ML4Good tools and projects.

The challenges the Impact Team at Vulcan takes on are wicked problems. These are systemic problems requiring an interdisciplinary approach to effect change. They demand collaboration and partnership – and perseverance, not silver bullets – to create lasting change. Curious about what "wicked" problems are? Want to learn more about how collaboration and partnerships help create lasting change? Click to read more.

#Holodome isn’t just for immersive cinematics any more! Learn how we enabled real time interactive content and games and the challenges we overcame to get there.

Don’t be intimidated by the fancy title. Becoming a Web Developer isn’t as hard as it sounds. Here’s some cheap / free resources to get you started. With a little time, practice and an openness to learning as you go, you’ll be making websites in no time. Click to learn more!

The Impact team at Vulcan works on various projects focused on wildlife conservation, ocean health, climate, and more. This Earth Day, we want to highlight some of the work Vulcan and its partners are doing in marine wildlife conservation, more specifically, in the space of an often overlooked group of species – sharks. Click to read more!

At Vulcan, we create products and technologies to help frontline workers do their work more efficiently and effectively. Our user base is small, but they’re doing important work in challenging settings. Learning about these unique challenges, which create new twists on several User Experience best practices, is key to producing tools that work in their real world.

At Vulcan, we work to tackle some of the world's toughest problems through technology, grants, storytelling, and advocacy. We employ measurement, evaluation, and learning activities to help teams define the problems they are trying to solve, the change they would like to achieve, and to map how use of the product will help end-users create that change. Click to learn more about why and how we do this.

Learn more about the take that the Impact team is taking in regard to the DevOps experience - what we use, what we've learned so far, and how we've adapted over time!

When we make maps for the Allen Coral Atlas, we have a question that follows of whether the map has been validated. We ask where the data came from to inform the creation of the map. The more calibration and validation data we gather, the more confident we are in the maps. Click to learn more about how this is done.

Vulcan's EarthRanger product has gone through a number of phases here on the Impact team. Before it was known at EarthRanger, it was known, internally, as the Domain Awareness System. In this week's post, we throwback to post written in 2016, when we were just at a couple sites.

On the Impact team at Vulcan, women are working on all the different aspects of our projects in a variety of roles. Women on the Impact team are biologists, project managers, philanthropists, engineers, designers, analysts, directors and more. They are protecting African wildlife, saving coral reefs, fighting climate change, stopping illegal fishing, and much more. Click to read about some of the fantastic ladies working on the Impact team at Vulcan.

User centric thinking, also known as “design thinking” has taken the business world by storm. Many organizations, like Ford, Capital One and AIRBNB have embraced it. But design thinking doesn’t happen overnight. It is a fundamental shift in how a company is thinking about their products. Learn more about Vulcan and the Impact's approach in this area.

Learn more about how technology and data power conservation work, from first-hand experience of someone who was able to make use of data from Vulcan in the wildlife conservation space.

At Vulcan, we often talk about our power to convene people. Time after time, we're reminded that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and partnerships are a key aspect to success in the Impact space. Read on to learn more about our approach to partnerships.

The Holodome is a platform that renders 360 content without the use of head mounted displays. Learn more about its history, evolution, the technology that supports it, and the team that built it in this latest blog post!

The Allen Coral Atlas builds its two core products, maps of the world’s coral reefs and a monitoring system for those reefs, on imagery from Planet’s Dove satellites. Learn about the first set of data processing steps we are taking as we turn those images into maps and a monitoring system.

Elasticsearch® is a powerful and widely-used document store, which is easy to get up and running out of the box. However, production-grade operations and monitoring have some gotchas. Read what Vulcan's Impact team has learned about running Elasticsearch® on Kubernetes® in production.

On the Impact team at Vulcan, we're often asked how do we measure results, how do we measure success. While there are are a number of ways this is done in the commercial world, how to do this at the intersection of tech and philanthropy requires some more thought. Read on to learn how we measure impact here, at Vulcan.

Our oceans help feed our planet, support millions of jobs around the world, generate trillions of dollars in economic activity every year, and support most of the world’s life. But the health of our oceans is under threat from unsustainable practices like illegal fishing in protected areas, while human, arms, resource and drug smuggling on the ocean threatens the safety and health of communities across the globe. Learn more about how we're using data and machine learning to protect our oceans.

Happy New Year! And with the New Year, we're sharing a few of the sources that one can go to get news about conservation, environment, climate, and its intersection with technology.

Take a look back at 2018 with the Impact Team. We look back and explore some highlights and milestones, what inspired and fueled us and peak into what's in store for the new year!

Fast-paced software projects can experience bottlenecks at the continuous integration (CI) phase of the software development lifecycle. Click through to learn how the we're transforming the developer experience to move full systems integration testing earlier in the traditional CI workflow.

The Idea Velocity of an organization is defined by the time the organization takes to ship a well-defined idea into a customer’s hand. As such, Idea Velocity is a high order metric that an organization’s leaders should strive to optimize. In this blog post, I capture my take on significant attributes that directly impact an organization’s Idea Velocity.

The Allen Coral Atlas aims to empower educated coral protection and restoration, so that reefs eventually flourish. Charlie, the Product Manager of the Allen Coral Atlas project recently had the opportunity to travel to Sri Lanka to work with coral conservationists there. Click to read more about the trip, the partners we're working with, and how conservationists have reacted to the Allen Coral Atlas.

At Vulcan, we are investigating using machine learning to spot poaching in aerial imagery. Find out how we’re hoping to leverage ML alongside the expert knowledge of African park rangers to more reliably direct ranger resources and help them protect African ecosystems so that they remain untouched and vibrant for years to come.

Modernizing Wildlife Surveys with Machine Learning (MWS) is a project at Vulcan, in which we aim to make getting wildlife population estimates easier and reduce the amount of error at the same time. Read on to learn more about why this is important and what we can do about it.

Working on the Impact team at Vulcan is pretty unique. #OnlyAtVulcan can you work on curbing carbon emissions, wildlife conservation, stopping bad actors, and more, all in one day. Read on to learn more about what some of the topics Vulcan is concerned about and how Product Management fits in.

Recently, Vulcan held its 4th annual EarthRanger Conference. The EarthRanger Conference brings together leaders from various Protected Areas across Africa. Click to keep reading and learn more about EarthRanger, the conference, and the ways we make an Impact in Wildlife Conservation.

Today, it was announced that Paul Allen has passed away. The Impact Team shares our deepest condolences with the Allen family.

Last week, we announced the Vulcan Machine Learning Center for Impact (VMLCI). Learn more about the challenges and opportunities we face when tackling machine learning (ML) problems in the philanthropic space and what may be in store for the future of ML at Vulcan.

Welcome to Concept Notes: Vulcan Engineering Blog. Within the engineering team at Vulcan, we strive to build solutions to create a better world. But we can't do it alone. We've created this blog as one of the ways to share ideas and start conversations. Read on to learn more about what we do, and what to expect from the Vulcan Engineering Blog.