Hello! I'm Mark Raynsford. I'm interested in computer science, electronics, industrial design, the arts... In particular, the list of crimes and punishments include:

• I enjoy logic and the formal specification and verification of software and protocols. Examples here may include: calino, medrina, cedarbridge, aurantium, etc.
• I'm very interested in software correctness, and I try to apply lessons learned from functional programming and languages with rich static type systems (in particular, languages with dependent types) to everyday programming tasks. I've written articles on this (such as the Type Tricks series). I tend to believe that wrapping an existing weakly-typed or error-prone API in a layer of strong types is time well-spent (jcanephora, jcoronado, etc).
• I work heavily with the Java programming language and have published hundreds of software packages written in Java. I am part of the Project Amber expert group at OpenJDK.
• I enjoy working with relational databases (PostgreSQL and SQLite in particular), have written many software packages that use them, and have also written software packages to manage them (schema versioning, etc). Examples here may include: cardant, darco, trasco, etc.
• I'm interested in the study of software modularity. I currently work with the Java platform module system, and have worked with other systems such as OSGi. According to a census of the Java module ecosystem, I seem to have the dubious honour of having published more Java modules than any other individual. I've also assisted numerous open source projects with respect to modularization.
• I maintain hundreds of active projects using the Apache Maven build system, and have written dozens of plugins for the system. I have used just about every C and Java build system in existence (including several that I developed), and Maven remains the one system out of all of them that I would consider sane, and the only one that can be relied upon for stable builds, year after year.
• I help build software that patrons are using to read library books all over North America. The same software has also been used in the past to deliver library books to schools in countries with limited access to education (Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, etc).
• I have over a decade of experience with developing Android applications, and have maintained the appropriate levels of cynicism, loathing, and disgust throughout.
• I have over 25 years of experience working with and administering Unix-like operating systems (Linux, BSD, SunOS/Solaris, etc). I'm experienced at building aggressively partitioned and locked-down systems with mandatory access control (SELinux, in particular).
• I'm very interested in information security, and rigorously follow secure coding practices. I'm interested in building systems with a paranoid mindset that incorporate multiple layers of security, and are intended to be secure-by-design. Examples may include: idstore, dixmont, etc.
• I maintain my own infrastructure for work and play on real hardware and VPS hosting, and self-host my own services extensively. I have a lot of experience running containerized workloads with Podman and Docker, package my own software as OCI images, and have built tools such as Waxmill to manage virtual machines on the FreeBSD platform. I'm a proponent of dogfooding.
• I appreciate software observability and typically integrate OpenTelemetry into my own software. I've built and maintained large monitoring setups with Grafana and Prometheus. In the process, I've discovered that there is almost nothing that cannot be transformed into a continuous signal and then used to interrupt your sleep at 4AM.
• I enjoy writing technical documentation and have designed many systems to facilitate the production of books and documents in formats that can be trusted to endure for decades at a time. The most recent example would be xstructural. I usually won't release software (with some exceptions) unless the documentation has been completed to a high standard.
• I'm interested in generative artificial intelligence for image generation, although currently remain deeply skeptical of the utility of large language models for most tasks. I've investigated tools and workflows for producing better images.
• I enjoy 3D rendering and design, and have produced numerous artistic (?) works using software such as Blender. I have, in the past, written 3D rendering engines. I have extensive experience with Vulkan and, unfortunately, OpenGL.
• In a past life, I worked with a lot of C, C++, and Ada. I no longer (frequently) wake up in a cold sweat.
• I make music despite the best efforts of the software industry to prevent it.
• I think the world would have been a lot better off had we not invented anti-aliasing.
• I maintain a blog where you can get more of this kind of thing in an even less coherent form.

Software

This section lists software projects for which I am (or have been) the primary author and/or maintainer. Projects are grouped somewhat arbitrarily, with the Core group being the projects that I'm actively maintaining on my own time. Other groups may indicate projects that that I'm either being paid to work on or have been paid to work on in the past. Other groups may be purely for historical interest.

Art

Works of questionable artistic merit.

• baguette
  Baguette (2016-10-18Z)
• corn
  Corn (2016-10-19Z)
• pillow
  Pillow (2016-10-20Z)
• rabbit
  Rabbit (2016-10-24Z)
• workbot
  Workbot (2016-10-29Z)
• chemriver
  Chemriver (2017-08-31Z)
• pine
  Pine (2017-09-08Z)
• unbolted_frontiers
  Unbolted Frontiers (2019-03-14Z)
• convenience
  Convenience (2019-09-07Z)
• dimenec
  Dimenec (2019-12-30Z)
• vanishing_path1
  The Vanishing Path 1 (2020-03-19Z)
• engineer_sleep
  The Sleep Of The Engineer (2020-08-23Z)
• heavywater
  Heavy Water Station (2020-09-11Z)
• icms
  A 3D-printable shell for the MakerHawk OV5647 webcam module (2020-09-27Z)
• kit.dust_yard
  Dust Yard (2021-04-04Z)
• kit.calais
  Calais (2022-04-08Z)
• dw.broadway
  Turnwise Broadway (2022-04-08Z)
• openpose_rig
  OpenPose rigs for Blender (2023-12-30Z)
• lowcarb
  Low carb 3D models for Stable Diffusion (2024-01-07Z)
• comfyui.wideoutpaint
  Wide outpainting workflow for ComfyUI (2024-04-14Z)
• starpath
  Star Path (2024-07-28Z)

Documents

Why use one word when a thousand will do? Information has a half-life, may have been true when I wrote it, and may no longer be true.

• history-vertex-spec
  A Brief History Of Vertex Specification In OpenGL (2012-01-19Z)
• displacement2d
  2D GPU Displacement Mapping (2012-04-25Z)
• lightweight-static-exceptions
  Lightweight Static Exceptions (2012-04-26Z)
• tt0-pcio
  Type Tricks 0 - Propositions In Constructors Of Immutable Objects (2012-06-18Z)
• tt1-pt
  Type Tricks 1 - Phantom Types (2012-06-19Z)
• ccat
  Crash Course In Algebraic Types (2012-07-29Z)
• glow-maps
  Glow Maps (2012-07-30Z)
• tt2-intcap
  Type Tricks 2 - Interfaces As Capabilities (2013-07-24Z)
• fso-tta
  Fragment Shader Outputs - Through The Ages (2014-06-28Z)
• tt3-genvis
  Type Tricks 3 - Generic Visitors (2015-06-03Z)
• adt-jvm
  Algebraic Types On The JVM (2016-01-19Z)
• udp-reliable
  Reliable UDP Algorithms (2016-08-20Z)
• brutal-felix-logging
  A Brutal Approach To Logging In An Embedded Apache Felix (2016-09-03Z)
• aeron-guide
  Aeron For The Working Programmer (2018-09-11Z)
• atmega328p-fn
  The ATMega328P From (Almost) Nothing (2021-08-29Z)
• outline-glsl
  Simple GPU Outline Shaders (2022-10-30Z)

Keys

This section provides public keys of various forms. All packages released on Maven Central are signed by the current release key. Personal correspondence may be signed by the current personal key. The current key policy is yearly-expiring keys, with each new set of keys being signed by the previous set. Expired/revoked keys are archived here in order to allow for the verification of old signatures.

The following keys have either expired or have been revoked:

Links

• The Palace Project
• LYRASIS
• Immutables
• JGraphT
• LWJGL
• Apache Maven
• OpenJDK
• Library For All
• Dyn4j
• Library Simplified