I’m 27 years in and blocking two hours every Friday to get fluent in QGIS 3.34, Dynamo for Civil 3D 2025, and SWMM 5.2 so I can automate more, tighten QA/QC, and prep for carbon tracking becoming standard. Looking for resources that bridge fundamentals to practice — short courses, example models, or cheat sheets that changed your workflow. If you were mentoring me for the next decade, what would you assign first?
@OP What moved the needle for me was building a QGIS Processing Model that joins a materials CSV to pipes, computes an embodied‑carbon score, and auto‑flags outliers — start with ‘Refactor fields’ + ‘Join attributes by field/value’ + ‘Geometry by expression’ and save the model as your living cheat sheet. Small caveat: lock CRS/units before exporting catchments to SWMM 5.2 or your areas and runoff will drift.
I carved my “two hours every Friday” into Dynamo for Civil 3D 2025 and built a Dynamo Player graph that checks pipe slopes/cover against a tiny CSV of project standards, then auto-colors offenders and drops a QA/QC CSV — now it’s a 90‑second run before every publish. Small caveat: don’t select by layer names; grab object handles so the check doesn’t break when someone renames a network. @OP If QA/QC is the driver, expose min/max slope and cover as Player inputs so non-Dynamo folks can tweak it without opening the graph.
Used one Friday block to wire up pyswmm with SWMM 5.2 and batch‑run alternatives, then auto‑export a CSV of node surcharge minutes and conduit full‑flow hours for QA; it instantly surfaced two undersized laterals. Start with GitHub - pyswmm/pyswmm: Python Wrappers for SWMM and copy their simple iteration example, then layer a threshold check so your outliers flag themselves for carbon and capacity review. Small warning: the GUI report rounding can hide brief spikes — pull timeseries via the API instead of relying on the.rpt, @OP.
Quick example: I turned QGIS 3.34 into a QA helper by storing standards and carbon factors as project variables, then using attribute form constraints and virtual fields to compute intensity and stop bad inputs; rule-based styling highlights anything past thresholds on save — it’s linting for layers. If you try one thing, make a project template with those forms baked in before chasing plugins; boring once, pays off weekly. Docs that helped: QGIS expressions/attribute forms 13.2. List of functions — QGIS Documentation documentation@OP.
@carl_jenkins99 your Dynamo Player check pairs nicely with turning QGIS 3.34’s Model Designer into a one‑click QA pass: read a standards CSV, run geometry validity and min radius/clearance tests with expressions, then auto‑export a flagged layer and a PDF atlas (the page that made it click for me: 27.5. The model designer — QGIS Documentation documentation). Only gotcha: lock package versions in Dynamo and keep CRS/field names consistent in QGIS or the chain gets wobbly like a tripod on gravel.
I got the most mileage by scheduling qgis_process to run a “QA+carbon” model headless right after my two-hour Friday slot — reads a standards CSV and a factor table, then dumps a fail log and per-layer carbon rollup into a dated folder. The only gotcha is Windows paths (), but once they’re fixed it’s hands-off; setup ref: 27.8. Using processing from the command line — QGIS Documentation documentation.
I’ve been doing a similar two‑hour Friday block, and the best bridge‑to‑practice win was cloning the USEPA SWMM 5.2 examples and turning one into a “template.inp” with QA flags and a carbon lookup, then tracking it in Git so diffs catch accidental parameter edits — examples here: GitHub - USEPA/Stormwater-Management-Model: Dynamic hydrology-hydraulic water quality simulation model for stormwater, wastewater, and combined sewer collection systems. Small caveat: units in SWMM will bite you (), so I added a tiny Dynamo Player routine in Civil 3D 2025 to dump pipe lengths/diameters to CSV with units stamped before import. If you want a QGIS touch, the AutoFields plugin gives you created/updated by/date for free and tightened our QA trail without training.
With your two-hour Friday block, my best win was a tiny Dynamo for Civil 3D 2025 setup: Civil3DToolkit + a ‘sandbox’ Data Shortcuts project, and a script that reads a pipe-rules CSV and outputs cover/velocity exceptions to HTML — portable QA you can rerun. In QGIS 3.34, park your symbology in Resource Sharing and name rules to match the standards CSV so Model Designer outputs auto-style. Small caveat: Civil3DToolkit lags 2025 — pin a release (GitHub - paoloemilioserra/Civil3dToolkit: Public repo for ancillary items of the Civil 3D Toolkit crowd-sourcing development.) or fall back to native nodes for edits.