2010 year in review

31.12.2010 11:58 ·  Notes  ·  year-in-review

With this post I’ll try to summarise the past year.

Last year I changed jobs twice. I left the area where I had been working for more than 6 years - the land registry. Then I worked for some time in a software company developing a trading platform for the Forex market. I had to learn the Ada language as the trading server was developed in this language. Despite the new field and new tools, I did quite well, although there were some difficulties. But I wanted something else…

Private life, this area is best described by the title of E. M. Remarque’s famous novel “All Quiet on the Western Front”. There is nothing to add.

There were lot of changes in the GIS world. The OSM (OpenStreetMap) project has gained worldwide recognition. In addition, Microsoft has given the project access to raster data from its Bing Maps service. Unfortunately, I am not yet involved in the OSM community, but I am very pleased with the development of the project.

ESRI has opened the Geodatabase API, Shapefile is still alive. GIS are pawing their way into the mobile device market.

QGIS is evolving: improved new symbology, raster calculator, QGIS MapServer, many new useful plugins. I have developed and released a few new plugins and continue to improve existing ones. QGIS User Guide was translated into Russian.

This year I was unable to attend the QGIS developer meetings in Pisa and Wrocław. It’s a shame and a pity.

Party of Regions won majorities on most regional and city councils as well as most of the mayoralties.

It’s been 10 years since school and 5 years since university.

On the desktop, I switched from Slackware to Debian testing. There is a dual-boot to Windows XP, as I need it sometimes, e.g. to build QGIS and/or test some bugs (the power of the computer does not allow comfortable use of virtual machines).

Basically, this is the year I gave up dancing. Most likely, for good.

Happy New Year!