“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”
Software develoment is something I do as an active hobby. I prefer open source development, in which the source code to software is available for others to read, modify, and redistribute. In particular, I believe this directly matches the ideals of scientific research and independent review. Scientific software available through open source licenses allows easy duplication of results, open review of techniques and software design, and use and improvement by others. Here are a few projects I work on in my free time.
 | Open Babel is a project to interconvert between various chemical file formats and molecular representations used in molecular modeling, visualization, and computational chemistry. It is both a program and cross-platform library designed to facilitate open source chemistry software development. I am the founder and senior developer of the project and gave a talk on Open Babel in May 2004. It’s saved me literally countless hours of time dealing with chemistry files. |
 | ChemSpotlight is a package I wrote for Apple's Mac OS X 10.4 Spotlight indexing system to understand chemistry files. I wrote it when I realized I had entirely too many molecular data files and no easy way to index or search them. It uses Open Babel under the hood. |
 | Ghemical is a molecular modeling and editing package for GNOME. It integrates a molecular mechanics force field as well as integration with MOPAC and optionally the MPQC package for quantum mechanical calculations. It integrates Open Babel to import/export to a variety of external programs. |
| Previous projects: I no longer do much with these projects but am proud to have participated in the past. | |
 | From 1998-2003, I was an active developer and project maintainer for the ht://Dig project, a website search engine. For a while, I was on the ht://Dig Board of Directors. I still serve in an advisor role to the project board. Don’t we all need to know how to search? |
 | At Williams College, I helped run Williams Students Online (WSO) a student computing group that creatively supported the needs of the Williams College community. |
We must be the change we wish to see in the world.