As the year is reaching its end, it is time to look back and remember what happened and how it affected my life.
Firstly, this year will be remembered for changes in professional life. After working on relatively small projects, I moved to work for a large company. I have never had to complain about a lack of interesting and challenging tasks, but now I’m working on the cutting-edge of geospatial technology and directly involved in the development of solutions that make GIS easier to use and accessible, simplify field data collection and processing huge amounts of data, and allow building a geospatial infrastructure either purely with open source components or by using a mix of proprietary and open source solutions.
I continue working on open-source projects, primarily QGIS. I actively contribute to Processing, update my own plugins, and continue with localisation and translation of documentation. Also, I have fixed a few bugs in GeoGig that prevented its usage with cyrillic and other character sets other than Latin1. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time and inspiration to complete another book, lets hope next year will be more productive in this regard.
The year was also packed with conferences and developer meetings. Ukrainian and international, small and big. Kharkiv, Girona, Bonn… Although sometimes (for example, at FOSS4G) I was a bit scared, I anyway made presentations and/or ran workshops.
I was also in Lviv for the first time. The one-week vacation flew by like a flash. Lots of interesting architectural sights, museums, the Giselle ballet, delicious coffee, and cozy evenings. I will definitely have to go there again.
I want to wish everyone and myself that the next year will be even more eventful, active, and diverse.
2014 is over, and it’s time to recall how it went for me.
At the beginning of the year, I finally took the risk of becoming self-employed (read: freelancing). There was a lot of paperwork involved, and then I had to deal with some of the nuances of our “wonderful” legislation. But on the whole, I am still happy with the result.
I received an invitation to GIS-Forum 2014 in Kharkiv, where I went in March and gave two workshops. Together with Daria, we started working on an introductory training course on QGIS. I also translated the QGIS website and documentation and localised IntraMaps Roam. I gradually cleaned up the blog and started writing again, although not as often as before.
Together with Daria, we created a virtual Ukrainian QGIS user group on Facebook. In addition, we started and successfully completed the process of creating the first OSGeo research and education laboratory in Ukraine and the former USSR. Around the same time, I became an OSGeo Charter Member and an OSGeo Advocate. At the end of the summer, I got a German visa and started preparing to participate in the 12th QGIS Developer Meeting. In autumn, I went to Essen for my second QGIS developer meeting.
At the end of the year, I agreed to an adventurous project, but I’ll tell you about that later.
All in all, it has been a very active year, full of events, meetings, and new experiences. Some things were achieved and even surpassed, while others remained in the form of plans. I do not have any special plans for the next year, except that I would like to take part in the next QGIS developer meetings on a regular basis.
With this post I’ll try to summarise the past year.
Work
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.
GIS
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.
Other things
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.
Last post of the year. It’s a good time to look back and summarise what happened.
At the end of April, I started my more or less active participation in the GIS community, which over time has become more than just a thematic resource and community for me. I found new friends here, and now most of my activities are directly or indirectly related to it.
Changing jobs… seems like a pretty big change. But after six months, I don’t see any improvements or advantages compared to my previous job. Promises are still promises, and everything I wanted to get away from is still there.
2009 will be remembered as the last year of the “senior” group of the pop dance team “Bravo”. For the last two years, the senior group has only been getting smaller and smaller, and here we are… In September, there were only five people left from the whole collective - 4 girls and 1 guy. But a bunch of newcomers arrived without any choreographic training. Our place was taken by the “middle” group, which continues to gain momentum, winning first places and all sorts of prizes at all sorts of festivals and competitions. All thanks to our artistic director and choreographer. Well done, Ira!
My first (and hopefully not the last) trip to the QGIS developer meeting took place this year. A week of working on QGIS, new friends, discussions, and a lot of impressions. Now I know for sure that QGIS is going to conquer the world :-).
After returning from Austria, I switched to using Linux. On the desktop, Windows has moved to the last line in the bootloader menu, and on the laptop, it is not there at all. Despite the lack of a few small things, Linux is an amazingly convenient and powerful system. There is no desire to go back to Win. I keep the “other system” for testing and a few very specific programs.