QGIS has been a key piece of my career for the past 10 years. This year I'm launching a SaaS where QGIS is, again, the most fundamental piece. I'm only hoping everything goes right so I can contribute back to this project what It deserves. One of the big OSS stars. Thanks QGIS team.
It has ended up being a huge piece of the last 7 years of my life and I didn't really intend for that to be the case. I have a strong bias towards "use industry-standard protocols when possible", so when we started adding some significant geospatial components to the UAV system I work on, I pushed hard for us to use GeoJSON or Spatialite wherever possible (we have since also added some Parquet). From that foundation, I started doing analysis with GeoPandas, which works great when you know what you're looking for but not amazing just for data exploration. Enter QGIS: because we settled on standard open formats... I can just go "Add vector layer..." and load the entirety of a flight's geospatial data right on top of a Google Map without doing any kind of data conversion at all!
Does it have quirks? Yes. Many. QGIS is an incredibly powerful tool, and it has caused me to swear at so many different pieces of it :D. Looking forward to checking out QGIS 4 and see what they've been cooking.
I had fun working with QGIS some years ago, connecting it to GeoServer, mapserver, importing shapefiles, and customizing a few maps. I didn't use as much as the GIS engineers I worked with, but it was definitely a great open source tool.
I had to use ArcGIS too, and while sometimes it performed well, when it didn't it was quite painful to have to deal with the local vendor to implement our features, and troubleshoot bugs in their software.
The ArcGIS tile dataset is good, but the software had favorite versions of Adobe Acrobat to remain stable. It must have improved if people still use it =3
I remember, 10 to twenty years ago, when GIS was still a huge part of my job. QGIS then went from being the "cheap opensource contender" to being my main tool... How much better it was than the previous ones...
Recently I explained to a student that Arc Pro is kind of like the Disney of GIS software. It’s powerful and colorful and very well known, but if you try and do things it doesn’t like, you’re going to have a bad time.
QGIS is my daily driver. It’s so much lighter and so much less bloat, it’s just wildly more efficient. These days I pretty much use Arc for machine learning features.
> if you try and do things it doesn’t like, you’re going to have a bad time.
Also that there's the 'Esri' way of doing things, and the 'platform independent' (more-or-less) way of doing things which do not play well with 'Esri-isms'.
Esri does have some really nice enterprise components though; I haven't yet found a remotely user-friendly open-source equivalent to Workflow Manager Server or Data Interop., or an as-polished ArcGIS Portal yet, though I constantly keep a look out.
QField is getting better and better, too. I wish I knew C++ well enough to help develop it further.
I've worked with developing plugins for QGIS. It's just Python and PyQT, along with a bunch of things provided by QGIS itself. Overall a very pleasant experience, and their docs are pretty good too.
my partner is working on a piece of software to predict late frosting for a data science company (it kills your seedling plantations, if you are into that sort of thing, i don't but sometimes the client wants it)
so i was considering adding that to qgis as the data is available freely.
Wow. I recently joined a grid management company and we use an (in my view) ancient piece of German software called Lovion. It's written in .net 4 I think.
Crazy to now see this piece of (free!) software that essentially runs circles around the software we pay heavily for.
I used QGIS 2.x and 3.x a lot when making maps for research papers. But something that always stung was reproducibility. The python tooling was not there compared to what I could do with click-and-mouse, and there was no easy way to transfer my click-and-mouse sessions into an equivalent python script.
Is the situation unchanged? (Maybe a good use for Opus would be to write a wrapper for the python tooling?)
QGIS is great. One of the truly good open source projects. I used it to successfully extract 3D height data for the mountains next to my hometown. This was not an easy task since the miuntains are on a national border and I had to combine height data from two national sources. It still worked out perfectly fine.
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Does it have quirks? Yes. Many. QGIS is an incredibly powerful tool, and it has caused me to swear at so many different pieces of it :D. Looking forward to checking out QGIS 4 and see what they've been cooking.
I had to use ArcGIS too, and while sometimes it performed well, when it didn't it was quite painful to have to deal with the local vendor to implement our features, and troubleshoot bugs in their software.
my next move would be to learn how to make my own plugins.
ps: i'm a forester, fwiw :)
Recently I explained to a student that Arc Pro is kind of like the Disney of GIS software. It’s powerful and colorful and very well known, but if you try and do things it doesn’t like, you’re going to have a bad time.
QGIS is my daily driver. It’s so much lighter and so much less bloat, it’s just wildly more efficient. These days I pretty much use Arc for machine learning features.
Also that there's the 'Esri' way of doing things, and the 'platform independent' (more-or-less) way of doing things which do not play well with 'Esri-isms'.
Esri does have some really nice enterprise components though; I haven't yet found a remotely user-friendly open-source equivalent to Workflow Manager Server or Data Interop., or an as-polished ArcGIS Portal yet, though I constantly keep a look out.
QField is getting better and better, too. I wish I knew C++ well enough to help develop it further.
Crazy to now see this piece of (free!) software that essentially runs circles around the software we pay heavily for.
Is the situation unchanged? (Maybe a good use for Opus would be to write a wrapper for the python tooling?)