[PD-dev] Introducing myself

[Russell Bryant]

Greetings,

I really like how this list encourages introductions of people that are new to
the development community.  It's nice to see where other people are coming from.

A few years ago, I started working on the open source project, Asterisk
(http://www.asterisk.org).  Asterisk is an open source telephony applications
platform.  It is most often used as a typical phone system, but it is really a
toolkit where we try to make it possible to do whatever you want to with a phone
call.

While in school, I started working part-time for Digium, the company that
sponsors Asterisk.  I have been working full time for Digium since January of
2007.  I now hold the position of Senior Software Engineer, and Open Source Team
Lead.

About a month ago, I visited New York University's ITP program.  I was there to
meet people that had done some extremely creative projects that involved
Asterisk.  I was looking for new ideas, or things that I could work on to make
Asterisk easier to use as a part of a larger creative project.  Whlie I was
there, I briefly met Hans-Christoph Steiner.  He gave me a quick rundown of
pure-data as we walked down the street.  We chatted about how there could be
some interesting applications between Asterisk and Pd.  So, I have been looking
at it since then.

I have since written a Jack interface for Asterisk so that I can hook up any
number of phone calls to other applications that support Jack.  I am currently
trying to figure out how to make a Pd patch to do it.  :)

While learning about Pd, I have started making some contributions to the source.
 I have been reading code to learn how things work in Pd.  Along the way, I have
been making little fixes to problems as I notice them.  I am "russellbryant" on
the sourceforge patch tracker.  Most of my changes so far have been little bugs
in string buffer handling.  However, I do have one sourceforge patch pending
that fixes a remotely exploitable stack buffer overflow (marked as private so it
can only be viewed by project members).

I'm interested in commit access, if and whenever other project members would
feel comfortable with it.  Mainly, I'm just interested in using it for smaller
bug fixes that are obvious enough for direct commit.  I am now starting to look
into the implementation of the various parts of existing jack support in Pd.  It
may be nice to be able to work on any larger changes in a developer branch or
something.  (However, before I started committing anything, I would like to help
draft a patch workflow document, that describes what gets committed where, when,
and by whom, so that I can ensure that I don't step out of bounds.  Please let
me know if something like this exists, and I missed it.)

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has contributed to Pd.  This is a really cool
application.  I hope that I can contribute something useful to the project.

--
Russell Bryant