FOSS4G 2026 has been a great opportunity to meet the open-source geospatial community, exchange ideas, and discuss the tools and workflows we are building at NextGIS.
Yesterday, NextGIS founder Maxim Dubinin gave two talks covering very different parts of the QGIS ecosystem: accessing geospatial services with QuickMapServices and improving the QGIS development workflow with QGIS DevTools.
The first talk focused on NextGIS QuickMapServices (QMS), a QGIS plugin and crowdsourced catalog of geospatial services.
QuickMapServices provides convenient access to basemaps and other web mapping services directly from QGIS. Over the years, it has grown into one of the most widely used QGIS plugins, with millions of downloads and a large catalog maintained with contributions from the community.
The talk covered the history of the project, how the service catalog works, its evolution over the years, and the role of community contributions in maintaining a large collection of geospatial services.
It also looked beyond the QGIS plugin itself. The QMS catalog is available through a public API, which makes it possible to use the same collection of services in other applications and geospatial workflows.
Slides: http://nextgis.com/foss4g2026/qms.pdf
The second talk was dedicated to QGIS DevTools, a toolkit designed to make QGIS plugin and script development more convenient.
Python makes QGIS highly extensible, but developing and debugging plugins has traditionally required working around limitations in the development environment.
QGIS DevTools helps bridge this gap by connecting QGIS with modern development tools such as Visual Studio Code. In particular, developers can launch a debugpy server directly from QGIS and attach VS Code to the running QGIS process.
This provides a much more familiar development workflow, including breakpoints, variable inspection, interactive debugging, and other capabilities developers expect from a modern IDE.
The talk demonstrated how QGIS DevTools can be used in real plugin and script development workflows and how it can reduce the friction involved in developing extensions for QGIS.
Slides: https://nextgis.com/foss4g2026/qgis_devtools.pdf
A big thank you to everyone who attended the talks, asked questions, shared experiences, and discussed ideas with us.
Events such as FOSS4G are especially valuable because they give developers and users a chance to discuss not only what already exists, but also what is still missing from current geospatial workflows. That feedback directly helps us understand where our tools can improve.
Thanks to everyone involved in FOSS4G 2026 for the discussions, feedback, and inspiration to keep building better open-source geospatial tools.
