2024 year in review

31.12.2024 19:28 ·  Notes  ·  year-in-review

I haven’t done this kind of summary post for a while, and I think it’s a good time to start doing them again.

This year has not been an easy one. It was full of hardships, losses, dramatic changes, and dashed hopes. All these things were draining almost all my attention and energy, leaving me nearly without any possibility to work on something I would like to, despite my efforts to return to normal.

While I was not able to work on QGIS as much as I would like, I still managed to contribute some bugfixes and new features, namely:

• a small feature allowing you to duplicate the composer grid in one click (Giovanni indeed had an itch, as one blogger wrote, and he mentioned it a couple of times. But the truth is that he never asked nor hired me to do something. It was entirely my own initiative to implement this functionality and a few other fixes/improvements as a gift for a good friend)

  

• added support for overriding widget wrappers in Processing (something that bugged me a lot as I used to use Processing extensively)
• implemented a native widget wrapper for GDAL raster creation options and updated most of the core raster algorithms to support raster creation options out of the box (another item from my long TODO)
• added support for marking Processing algorithms as favorite algorithms for easier discoverability

  

• fixed a bug in the QGIS Browser metadata search functionality that made it unusable in some cases and added a couple of small UX improvements
• a small feature allowing you to duplicate any connection in the QGIS Browser

  

• added a set of tools to Processing to deal with layer metadata (extract layer metadata to a QMD file, populate layer metadata from a QMD file, copy metadata from one layer to another, combine layer metadata with the metadata of another layer, set and clear some basic metadata fields such as Title, Abstract, Identifier, etc., add new history entries to a corresponding metadata field)
• ported Basic Statistics Processing algorithm to C++ and added a small improvement along the way
• another small feature to allow creation of empty GeoPackages from the QGIS Browser

For some people, this list may look big, but it is actually not. Of course, I’m happy that I was able to do all this, as it is better than nothing. Still, it is far behind my previous level of involvement in the project.

I also published one QGIS plugin — OpenLitterMap — to download data from the eponymous project. Nothing special, just a small Processing provider with a single algorithm for now. The plugin is a bit limited as the parent project lacks a proper API, but I will try to keep an eye on it and update and improve the plugin when the new version with the API is released.

There were a couple of other specialized plugins I developed for clients. One integrates a landslide modeling tool, utilizing the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) approach, into QGIS and the other implements a set of validation rules for fiber optic networks. Since both plugins are not of interest to most users, I decided not to write about them in detail here. Maybe one day I will write a separate post about the challenges and problems I faced while working on these projects.

Unfortunately, my own plugins and projects had almost zero activity, and I really need to do something about that.

As for the rest of my life, it’s too early to draw any conclusions, as I’m still in the process of understanding things and adapting to the new situation. There are still a lot of issues to resolve and things to handle, from work-related problems to personal life.

I hope that the next year will be more active and positive, with new projects and professional challenges, events and travels, new connections and experiences.