With the end of the Second World War, food preparation changed a lot. At the time everything was revolutionary and fashionable. The modern microwave found its place in the kitchen as well as the Tuperware boxes. The coffee was now instant and cake mix was used for baking.

Photo by Jacob Schwartz on Unsplash Photo by Jacob Schwartz on Unsplash
Many home cooks used cake mix which contained all ingredients like flour, dried powdered eggs and milk. All you had to do was adding water and the cake was ready. Later, when you were sitting at the coffee table and friends admired the delicious cake and asked for the recipe, the cook had to admit that the art was adding water to the finished mixture.

People started to be disappointed. They did not feel that it was their cake but the product of a box. No one was proud of their baking skills anymore. It was something soulless.

What happened next you may ask?

Cake companies removed the egg & milk powder from the mixture and put them back into the hands of the baker. Now, home cooks needed to add the egg and the milk themselves to the cake mix and the people had the feeling again that this was their cake. Everybody was again proud of their performance and baking skills.

Controversial open-pit coal mine in North Rhine–Westphalia, Germany | Data: Landsat | Skript: geemap package from Qiusheng Wu Controversial open-pit coal mine in North Rhine–Westphalia, Germany | Data: Landsat | Skript: geemap package from Qiusheng Wu
With web-based tools like EarthEngine & EO Browser, remote sensing workflows, that used to take hours or days, are calculated in minutes and the result is ready for download.

Nowadays it is easy to use cloud computing infrastructure provided by Google or Amazon to work with analysis ready time-series image stacks. We only need a few lines of code and we have our result.

The latest trend is to carry out earth observation analyses without coding, using only a drag and drop model builder with a nice user interface. Just tell the system where and when and press GO and the time series animation video is ready for download. It’s all great and anyone, even my mother, can now be a remote sensing analyst.

But later at night, when you are sitting at the dinner table and your friends admire the great time series animation and ask for the recipe, you can only admit that you only needed to add water to the already prepared cake mixture.

Get your fingers dirty

I need coding to feel complete. The relief when the code runs through and no red error flag appears. The perceived control over the software. After all, it’s not that hard.

Happy coding!