Lots of code, fruitful discussions & productive collaboration: Review of a successful retreat

As announced, we were together with our sister company mundialis at a retreat in Greece from October 1st, 2021 to October 8th, 2021. Retreats have a long tradition with us (e.g. international 2018 in Spain, 2015 in Portugal, 2013 in Croatia, 2011 in Mallorca and many times at home in Bonn) and give us time and space to think about processes and structures away from everyday business and to try out exciting technologies. Our internal team cohesion also regularly benefits from our retreats.

This year, 29 colleagues and I made our way to the Peloponnese, more precisely to Agios Nikolaos in the Calme Suites Mani

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, rendering OWS terrestris

In fantastic weather and a very pleasant environment, we were able to pursue all the things that move us forward as companies. Here is an excerpt of what we dealt with:

Actinia (subsequently released as v2.0.0) has been expanded and improved in several places:
- New or improved endpoints have been added, for example to be able to offer vector uploads
- More and better tests
- Individual bugs have been fixed (e.g. for the use of slashes in endpoints, the deletion of directories, the support of further operations in r.mapcalc, etc.)
- Linting of further directories using flake8
- Tutorials have been revised and updated
Many things have happened in the SHOGun context:
- The SHOGun Docker Image now contains a generic graphical admin interface and a simple map client based on react-geo by default.
- SHOGun itself has been upgraded to Java 17
- Further integration tests have been added
- The automated OpenAPI spec generation has been tested and improved
- The ability to scale horizontally has been extensively tested and is now included in the standard docker-compose setup
- The landing page has been updated
Numerous improvements have been developed on the (still unpublished) Actinia-QGIS plugin
Our Docker GeoServer image (GitHub, Dockerhub) received a lot of love: It is now built using GitHub-Actions, uses OpenJDK 11, can handle its own fonts and plugins better, and much more
Extensive work has begun that will ultimately lead to a windowless GeoStyler
Numerous releases of GeoStyler components: GeoStyler v7.2.1, GeoStyler Style v5.0.0, GeoStyler SLD-Parser v3.0.0 & GeoStyler OpenLayers-Parser v3.0.0
A PostgreSQL JDBC driver has been proposed a performance optimization (currently under review)
We continued to work on a GeoServer GRASS raster data DataStore, and we hope to publish it soon
Our free OpenStreetMap WMS has been split into two group layers: one for geometries and a dedicated label layer. This clears the way for even more flexible use of the layer and we hope to be able to internationalize the display of the labels more easily
We discussed and evaluated variants on the complex of topics of agility in our companies and the many projects we support: What framework conditions can we create to successfully drive projects forward together in an agile manner? How do we formulate offers and contracts in such a way that we can realistically describe agility and sustainably implement it in projects?
Work on an internal tool for personnel planning has begun based on the svelte library
Product sheets and websites (e.g. for 3D) have been revised and expanded, Sneek-Peek
The local development setup for Mr. Map has been improved
We have tried out and evaluated Kotlin, graphql-mutations, rtk-query, redux toolkit and many, many other libraries, languages and tools
The styling options in QGIS were re-evaluated, resulting in the following map (proof-of-concept, Germany is not an island):

Of course, there was also time to relax, whether hiking, swimming in the Mediterranean or enjoying incredibly rich and delicious food. Some impressions from our time together can be found at the end of the article.

Now we are highly motivated and inspired to start the end-of-year sprint with our customers and partners.

Our accommodation: The Calme Suites Mani