It is with sadness I leave the OSGeo Community Sprint. Folks will be continuing to do great work all week, so stay tuned for those updates elsewhere. It’s been a busy year travel-wise and it’s time to get back to the family.

This was a bit of a homecoming for me, seeing all sorts of folks I haven’t seen in a while, including some of those founders and core contributors to the backbones of the open geospatial ecosystem as well as newer contributors to august projects.

PostGIS and GEOS

My first code sprint was in Boston in 2013, and I recall fondly the welcome especially from the PostGIS crew. While a heavy user of PostGIS expecting that one day I would contribute to the project, that still hasn’t happened. But I got to sit near the PostGIS crew and listen in on their questions, problems, and directions, and that’s always a joy.

Probably one of the more interesting things in that space lately is Paul Ramsey and Martin Davis’ movement to Crunchy where they’re doing a whole lot of work on PostGIS and GEOS. This is a bit of a homecoming for Martin — getting pulled back in to the core contributor space.

Point Data Abstraction Library

PDAL continues to grow, and Howard Butler, Andrew Bell, Connor Manning, Brad Chambers (and others I’m so rudely forgetting at the moment) are in attendance. I had great conversations with all (some I was meeting for the first time), but boy does my mind get blown when talking to Howard. So many great connections, ideas, and hints of paths to follow that support where OpenDroneMap and photogrammetric point clouds can go. Also PDAL is going in interesting directions beyond the point cloud, so watch that space.

GRASS GIS

Anna Petrasova and Vashek Petras are in attendance. Among other things they’re working on that include PDAL, Python3, and git, Anna is looking into building an extension to WebODM that will enable processing OpenDroneMap outputs further using GRASS. There are some really exciting possibilities for custom work flows on photogrammetric products.

MapServer

Steve Lime and company are there too. Being hosted in Minneapolis, this makes sense a crew are working this week on MapServer. My experience with MapServer is building a functional version of it for Mac OS X in 2004 in advance of a job interview (it only took me 160 hours and it was the first project I ever built or compiled — a painful prospective for that age). It was so cool to see maps rendered on the fly and sent to the browser and inspired much of the FOSS4G I have done since.

Also, Steve is a gracious host: this is a productive, well fed, and chill event.

OpenDroneMap

Finally, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention cool work being done this week by David, Jake, and Nathan at Solspec. They’ve been integrating OpenDroneMap into their workflows and had both lots of ideas of improvements and hope to contribute some of those ideas back in the form of code this week. Watch this space for more.

Ok, the plane is boarding soon. Time to go snuggle the children and help out around the house. Much love to all the above folks and all the rest I haven’t mentioned.