FOSS4G UK Review

I had a great time at FOSS4G UK last week. I was not feeling well the week before so it was a good change of pace for me. Get out and enjoy a different city. It always is sad to leave my small family (wife and dog) but I love traveling around the world.

I was looking forward to Edinburgh, I heard so many goods things about the city and Scotland in general. I knew it would be a short trip because I was needed at home, so I tried to get to know the city a little bit for the next trip we‘re making there.

The city is beautiful. It‘s always nice to see old buildings that survived a long time and the feeling of an old European city is unmatched. Due to me not feeling too well, I did not attend the ice breaker nor the party. But I went to a pub myself to enjoy some whiskey and some Scottish food.

Conference

The venue was great. Interesting setup of the rooms and a nice change of pace to get out to enjoy the sun and the beautiful view of the hill in front of the venue. The food was good, a nice mixture of warm and cold food but sometimes it felt it could have been more.

My workshop went great, although it was only an hour. I used my new platform that I created for my online course and these workshops. And I think it worked quite well. I had a full room of about 15 people I would say.

My talk got a good reception. I changed it a lot compared to the version that I presented at FOSS4G NA. So, even if you saw it in San Diego, it might be worth checking out.

Interesting talks:

GeoSeer is a nice project helping you to find OGC Webservices like WMS and WFS. https://www.geoseer.net

A Lightning talk showed a nice project from the University of Twente (Netherlands). It uses vegalite to create maps from … It is a great tool to explore different ways to map the same data and learn about what works and what does not. I would love to see some more explanation involved why this way of mapping the data might not work well. But it‘s a great start and uses vegalite to make it easy. https://kartoweb.itc.nl/TMT/

There was a lot of talk about R (Shiny) in and between the sessions.

I enjoyed the conference very much and will definitely try to be back for the next iteration.

It was only a short trip because I was needed home. So I did not stay for additional days. I will definitely be back and explore the city more and the surrounding area. Need to go to Islay :)