User:Alan Richmond

I live in South Wales with 1 cats, 1 son, and 1 wife. I've lived in several other countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, USA. I was a software developer for several international scientific research institutes & projects, e.g. the Hubble Space Telescope. I was a Principal Systems Engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. I have Bachelor degrees in physics and mathematics. I was a web developer since 1993, starting at NASA/GSFC (near Washington, DC). I founded one of NASA's first web sites, wrote the first web calculator (WebCalc), and founded EncycloZine, the web's first XHTML site, in November 1998. I founded the Web Developer's Virtual Library, the web's first commercial web site for web developers. My wife, Lucy, was a programmer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. We met by both working on the HST Data Management Facility. Later I went to work there also.

Most of my career has been as a scientific software engineer and sometimes team leader creating user interfaces, databases, and real-time control and data acquisition systems for Doel Nuclear Power Station, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Hubble Space Telescope, High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive, European Southern Observatory, Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Joint European Torus. I have presented several papers on scientific software systems at conferences.

I now tend to Python3.codes, Tuxar's Open Source Software directory & computing blog and Mandrian's FractalArt.Gallery - Fractals and Mathematical Art in South Wales. More..