Hi all! My name is Bryce Harrington, I've been involved in the Inkscape project since its start. Not sure why I've never posted to the forums before, but wanted to swing by. If you have an interest in bettering either the software or the community, I can help get you started.

Hi Bryce,

Welcome to the forums. =)

Thanks for all the work you've put into Inkscape! It's an excellent bit of software and the world is a better place for it being available as FOSS.

Regards,
TD

Welcome aboard!

It's nice to have developers around, may this opening be fruitful for you, for the project and of course for the community.

(Hope the approving latency isn't too large.

Thank You for your visit.

I recalled your name immediately, as I remembered the day so well, about a year ago, when somebody finally made a nice working build of Inkscape 0.92 for Mac available , and it was you, right?

So, a big thanks from a Mac user who appreciates your efforts, for sure..

I’ll bet compiling something for Macs’ , what, with all the Apple quirks and rules must be extra problematic.
Sorry about the NooB question but, do you actually have to use Xcode or is it done some other way now ?
There used to be ‘cross compilers’ used a lot, or do they actually still do it that way at all ?

I hope some people will try to pick your brain while you are around, and we can learn something.

Welcome, indeed.

@GAngus : that was Tim Sheridan (https://inkscape.org/en/~tghs), with help from suv
This is Bryce: https://inkscape.org/en/~bryce - he usually publishes the source code releases and handles lots of organizational (legal/financial/infrastructure) stuff, and he also tries to get us organized (which is a lot of hard work, too).

Hi Bryce, good to see you here

Wow, thanks for that correction.
Senior moment here, I guess, sorry.

I've liked to read how happy you were about getting your needs met in this community, and I bet Bryce will, too

Always happy to welcome developers!

And for those who didn't know, Bryce is a co-founder of the Inkscape project, lead developer, and president of Board of Developers.

Ohai Bryce! Great to see you here!

I'm curious: do you spend more time using Inkcsape or building it? I think a lot of people may be wondering that about developers. How come Inkscape turned out to be so intuitive to use? How did programming and decisioning go in the early days? Could you please share some stories?

Thanks for all the greets!

Yes the OSX packages are thanks to a list of interested OSX users not unlike yourselves, each of whom took a shot and failed, but left good notes for the next person. Over time and a number of people taking up the baton, it eventually came to be. Tim deserves a lot of thanks for finally finishing it and getting it working, but there were a lot of others involved leading up to it. My own role was merely to encourage the note taking, and then point interested new folks at the info when they took up the challenge. The story's not over, either. The 0.93 release and it's conversion to gtk3 will allow significant changes to OSX as we work towards native packaging. A lot of other improvements have been discussed both to the packaging and to how inkscape runs on Macs, and there's much still that can be done so if anyone is interested in joining in on this technical work, there's certainly good opportunities there.

While I'm a very active developer I'm actually not a very active _coder_, and so the amount of time I spend just doing builds is quite limited. I do a lot of building when preparing for making releases, but that's fairly irregular.

My main use of Inkscape these days is to do drafting of woodworking designs, mainly utility furniture like desks and bookcases and shelving units. I just finished a large wall coat rack for my wife and kids. I'm currently designing a parts organizer / work table for my woodshop.

My kids also like to play in Inkscape with me, and it's been fun teaching them various graphics related concepts.

I always mean to get deeper into coding, and I certainly enjoy that aspect of it, but when I find myself with Inkscape time there's always lots and lots of other tasks needing attention. Currently, I've got a bunch of irons in the fire. I spend a considerable amount of my time doing infrastructure wrangling (hosting provision, mailing list migration, code hosting, bug tracking, etc. etc.) I'm also getting the release ready for 0.92.3 and plotting out how we're going to get 0.93 finished. And I've been working on sorting out how we can establish donor-funded development work. I consider my primary duty in Inkscape is to find ways to "unblock" people - remove whatever obstacles are hindering them from contributing and participating in Inkscape.

Coding-wise, currently my focus is pretty far down the stack at the renderer layer. I maintain the Cairo graphics library, which is what we use to convert geometric objects into the pixels displayed on the screen. Lately I've been learning and experimenting with Vulkan, which is a hardware-accelerated graphics technology; it is intended for 3D graphics but in theory it should be able to draw 2D far faster than Cairo does currently.

Bryce wrote:Coding-wise, currently my focus is pretty far down the stack at the renderer layer. I maintain the Cairo graphics library, which is what we use to convert geometric objects into the pixels displayed on the screen. Lately I've been learning and experimenting with Vulkan, which is a hardware-accelerated graphics technology; it is intended for 3D graphics but in theory it should be able to draw 2D far faster than Cairo does currently.

That's some great news!
For performance testing would suggest checking these out at some point: performance test material collection.