This is my last post of the series, which is also my last pending task of the Outreachy internship. I’m late with this wrap-up, sorry if you were waiting for that, but during the school year I had a hard time to keep up with my activities related to the plugin. Now that I’m on vacations I’m closing the cycle.

On the 1st of October 2015 we presented to the community the work accomplished by HOT Outreachy interns. My intervention can be seen through the HOT Youtube page, and I’ll try to summarize it here.

Looking back at the experience with Outreachy, I realized that my journey was not very typical. I have a background with computers and I’m currently studying environment, but I’ve been a free software enthusiast for many years now. I’ve started contributing to HOT as a remote mapper in early 2015, then I’ve chosen Outreachy as my summer project. With HOT I had the chance to use my technical skills for something that I was already interested by other means (its humanitarian aspect).

Since many of the projects proposed by HOT interested me, I’d say my first challenge was the choice of the topic I would be working on during my whole vacations. HOT as an organization had proposed 17 ideas, from which I selected the following 3: creation of moodle courses, translation workflow for LearnOSM and OAM QGIS plugin. The last one was a good opportunity to connect both of my areas of studies, and that was the main reasoning of my choice.

After that, my next challenge was to produce a Hello World QGIS plugin as a prove of concept, also to serve as my first contribution to OAM. Since I had very few experience with GUI programming, this was not a very easy task, specially considering that the application deadline was at my exam period for the spring term. The successful application came only 2 days before the HOT Summit, where I had the change to meet the international HOT community, specially Cristiano and Drazen who were my mentors.

From there, I had 3 months of challenges, from learning the best practices in the development of QGIS python plugins, to choosing my development tools, and learning more about OAM and the many acronyms that surround the project. My previous posts outline the development phases, please refer to them for more details:

1. Project setup and research
2. Plugin features and designed
3. Upload functions
4. Outreach
5. From tabs to wizard
6. Outreachy wrap-up

The release of the experimental package happened on September 12th 2015. At this moment, 1383 downloads were made, and a couple of bugs were reported by users. We currently have 20 open bugs, which we consider to be outside the scope of the internship and will be dealt by the development team as the plugin evolves. A new developer has joined us, Yogi, as I already mentioned in a previous post.

In terms of the internship experience, I can point out as skills learned during those 3 months (and more): python and Qt development, basic concepts of remote sensing and image processing, writing and communication skills, time and tasks management, and the experience with the OAM team, through which I could follow and contribute with the project being shaped, since the beginning.

Now that the internship is over I need to keep up with my studies, so development will definitely slow down from my side. At the same time we have plans of refactoring the code and many open bugs, so we really need more people to get involved. I also want to make space in my schedule to go back to mapping, as I first contributed to HOT. And as a final future plan, I’d love to work on the field. I’d like to be in contact with people on the ground, work with outreach and training, follow the results of our collaborative work from closer and closer, and help with whatever skills I have to make it be better used.

Thank you OAM, HOT, OSM and the Outreachy program. Thank you everyone who helped me along the way, and thank you those who will join the team and help us with development, testing, bug reports, or in any other way.

Happy hacking!