Shaping the future after 20 years of HydroloGIS

Exactly 20 years ago, Silvia and I started a tiny little company called HydroloGIS. We knew it had to be about creating tools for environmental engineering, and that everything we would do had to be free and open source software and knowledge. And that is what we have been doing for the last 20 years. 10 years ago I wrote a long post about how no one believed we would make it, what we were able to accomplish, and how our drive to continue for another decade was strong.

Today, with a little tear in my eye, I am here to announce that after 20 years, Silvia and I have decided to close down HydroloGIS for good and continue with our freelance consulting positions. This obviously sounds sad and bad, but actually it is not as bad as it sounds. We have always been geospatial experts and the bureaucratic overhead of the company just does not make sense for us anymore. 

In addition, over the years we have developed interests outside of the core business of the company. In addition to geospatial development for engineering, I still enjoy working with Arduino, have a deep love for 3D modeling and printing, laser cutting, and all those nice technical things that allow you to learn something new every week these days.

And as the wind of change blows, another big change comes with the fact that after almost 10 years I am quitting my teaching activities at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano. In fact, I already resigned from one of the courses last year and will give my last exams in Advanced Geomatics next week. I have always been an advocate of learning to code early to shape your mind to problem solving and STEM and I saw how much today's university students miss this and have huge problems to learn it at the age of around 25. On the other hand, I saw how quickly my 6 and 8 year old kids learned it by playing. So probably one thing I will look into (well' I kind of already did) are Coder Dojos.

So what's next? Not much to say. I will be doing much the same as before. 

I will be available at my Giant (or G-Ant or Geo-Antonello if you prefer) website. There you can see what I have done and what I am working on. If you need my services, just drop me an email. Mainly I love to develop on free and open source geospatial and to teach geospatial scripting, be it with geoscript or pyQGIS.

Silvia has not yet decided for her own brand, but will still be available under the HydroloGIS umbrella. Even if the company closes down, we will keep the brand alive to represent the joint projects we are still doing (a lot). She will still be doing hardcore hydrologic-hydraulic modeling and GIS power user projects.

Thanks to all of you who have believed in the noble cause that HydroloGIS has represented all these years. We love you.