Towards sustainable FOSS with Quansight Labs

Background

Rumors of my affiliation with Quansight Labs are indeed true. I have had the pleasure of joining the Labs division as a software engineer 1, whose philosophy is fantastically and succintly described by their director Dr. Ralf Gommers. This means, in nutshell, that in my spare time I will be able to contribute to the continued maintenance of key FOSS projects.

Why?

A reasonable question. I have been contributing to and managing FOSS projects for over ten years now under the assumption of one day aspiring to be described by Fig. 1. Over time however, there have been consequences which have required a restructuring of how I view my commitments. The projects I have had the pleasure to work have grown in scope to the point where it became increasingly difficult keep contributing to at a sustained pace.

Figure 1: A vision of my understanding of FOSS maintenance courtesy xkcd

Figure 1: A vision of my understanding of FOSS maintenance courtesy xkcd

Interviews

The interview process was a key factor in my decision making process. In particular, I was able to gainfully grow as a programmer and person through each one; which was incredibly refreshing.

Ralf Gommers
Ralf and I discussed several projects which might benefit from my commitment along with wider contexts surrounding FOSS ecosystems; I was also reintroduced to the meson build system
Chris Ostrouchov
We discussed the nix ecosystem and how it could and should be used to gain more ground in the High Performance Computing community 2
Ivan Yashchuk
I met with Ivan, and we discussed parallelism in C++, the standards committee, and he introduced me to SYCL

These interviews convinced me that I would continue to grow during the proposed projects.

Projects

For starters I shall be working on the f2py section of Dr. Melissa Weber Mendonça’s CZI grant with Dr. Pearu Peterson.

Misc

Interestingly, I realized soon after I joined, that some of my old GSoD mentors Aaron Mueuer and Amit are also at Quansight, which was very heartening to know as well.

Conclusions

This is a huge honor and will help focus and enhance my efforts towards helping the wider scientific computing community.

  1. For 20-25 hours a week ↩︎

  2. Which tied into a larger discussion taking place also at Tweag (and the Icelandic HPC cluster) revolving around Nix-HPC ↩︎