After a week with QGIS members from all over the world we arrived back home and can say that once again, the QGIS developer meeting #13 was a great event.
It started with the QGIS User Conference where a lot of interesting talks from experiences in day-to-day usage to low-level technology insights could be attended. Tim Sutton in the end took the chance to shortcut users and developers directly, asking for feedback and advice – a great way of reducing the gap between development and usage. Also outside the conference rooms it was great to talk to all the users, developers, geo-geeks, to have interesting discussions and to hear how the software we produce is being seen, where it rocks and where it requires more polishing.
The second day of the User Conference was all about workshops and a everybody could get some insights into new topics or get a more profound understanding of possibilities and techniques hands-on. I haven’t attended any workshop myself but I have heard from several people that they were totally worth the time.
The rest of the week it was all about development again. That’s what I thought at least in the beginning – but it turned out that it was much more socializing than development. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! Finally I still got around to do some development done, which I will try to sum up in a later post here.
One thing that I always enjoy is to be able to practice languages. Thank you Violeta, Mar, Paolo, Victor and so many others for the Latin language part! (I don’t even start with English or this page will be too long)
The usual suspects were present as expected but also many new faces could be seen. It is awesome to see how this event gets more attraction and visitors every year!
One of the best things about it is that there is so much knowledge around and that the decision circles are really short. Regardless if some questions you may have are related to QGIS, other FOSSGIS, general open source, geo-spatial or whatsoever, you can be sure that the right people will be there to talk about it and finally get the ok to do something or a good reason not to do something.
If you have never been to a developer meeting or a user conference, you should definitely consider to go there if it is coming close to you. It will be good for you to talk to everybody and it will be good for everybody to talk to you!
Thank You
Finally I would like to say that I really enjoyed having been hosted at Skovskolen. Lene Fischer did an amazing job and it was more than clear that without the many helping hands that have been around it would never have been possible to organize and hold a conference like this. Many thanks also to the students, the kitchen, the technicians, the cleaning crew and all the people from the QGIS community who helped to prepare and give talks and workshops. You all rock!
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