It is hard to believe, but I have been at Kitware for just over a year now. How are things going? I would say very well…I am very pleased I made the move, and that Bill Hoffman pushed me into applying after meeting him at the first Camp KDE. Kitware is growing fast, we are always on the lookout for new talent and I am already starting to feel like an old timer with all of the new employees joining.
I had my first ever annual review, which went well. We received word in September that my first SBIR proposal had been accepted, and we are working on getting the contract in place for that. So watch this space - a great collaboration coming up working on open source chemistry visualization, editing, database integration, and computational chemistry input file generation along with analysis of the outputs. I think this is a great opportunity to extend VTK, and Avogadro.
I took a very active role in our migration to Git, and I am pleased to say that it has been going well. I also more recently got Gerrit up and running, introducing tightly integrated code review to some of our open source projects at Kitware. I played a large role in setting up one of our most complex build systems to date for Titan, where it can build Qt, Boost and VTK (among other dependencies) using CMake's external project features. I have also had the opportunity to work with some of the Boost developers, and am helping with their build system work.
I have mostly concentrated on 2D rendering in VTK, using OpenGL. I replaced the existing 2D charts in VTK and ParaView with new charts using a new 2D rendering abstraction. So we now have a selection of chart types, with interactivity, that can be used on both client and server side. More recently I have been going even lower level, and working on FreeType font rendering in VTK, and seeing what I can do to improve the capabilities there.
There is lots of other stuff, some of it I have talked about here, and other bits I will when I find time. It has been a great first year, and looks like it is shaping up to be an even better second year. I feel very lucky to be getting paid to work on open source, open science and I get to work on some very interesting problems that help real scientists. Going forward I hope to introduce more scientists to open source, open data, open standards and collaboration platforms. I am very privileged to have worked with so many forward looking scientists over the last few years, and am a proud unmember of the Blue Obelisk.
I think Kitware is the perfect place for me to push forward open source in science, and am refreshed that I rarely need to push anyone here in that direction. I have been driven to learn a lot of new things in the past year, and it has been tough at times, but I have thoroughly enjoyed it. There are some really amazing projects coming up in the next year - so watch this space!