Hey, it’s me, David.
I’m the person who develops most of this code. I’m interested in how animals communicate with sound, and I’m trying to make life easier for all of us that use computational methods to study acoustic behavior.
Hopefully, at some point, a team of people will work together to develop it, or something like it, once I can convince them that’s a good idea.
Then finally I can spend more time playing video games and birding, or doing whatever it is that people do when they’re not being open source software maintainers.
First I have to convince more people that the ideas behind this code are good ideas. Recently I have realized that just writing the code isn’t enough. According to people who have been at this longer than I have, one way to talk people into things is to build not just a project, but a community. (See rule 5 here, and notice I am ignoring rule 1.) Well, I have been working on building a community:
we have gotten a lot of contributors to at least one package, vak. And I am expecting to get more contributors to our core package VocalPy, once we share results we are getting with it right now, using newer features we have added and are adding. We also have a growing number of people joining our forum and asking questions.
But it seems like I need to do more if I really want the community to grow. I need to actually explain about what I’m doing here.
So, okay, fine, we will have a developer’s blog. And I guess right now that’s the royal we–mostly me, although I definitely don’t want it to stay that way. Mainly this will be a place to post about new releases, and about research that uses the code. Look for more posts soon.