Who am I?

I am current a project lead of ~15 engineers working on a GPS monitor station network. I have degrees of BS/MS in Aerospace Engineering. I have been doing a combination of programming, user interface/information presentation design, system design/system engineering, and project management for over 15 years. I have background in object oriented design and have used C, C++, FORTRAN, and Rexx extensively. I have dabbled in Ruby, Java, and Perl as well. I discovered wikis a little over a year ago and realized the power they have to organize teams and document information. I compared various wikis and found TWiki the best suited to what we do in our development environment. I setup a test server, created some examples, started showing it to people, and it took off from there. I currently run TWiki at home and a private one at work. I will soon be setting up a third TWiki site that will be public and support an open source GPS project we lead that's called the GPSTk (http://www.gpstk.org). I am the TWiki advocate in our group as well as the TWiki administrator. I have developed (or helped develop) some TWiki applications that provide a structured web application for requirements, problem tracking, test case tracking, and ops procedures. Use of TWiki in our organization is now beginning to grow beyond our team to early use on a few other project.

What can I do?

I can design, program, test, etc as any developer/system engineer can though I am not as fluent in Perl. I can also perform project management and process development/improvement. In terms of TWiki, I have already contributed some bug reports to various plugin pages and have developed one fix. I expect my level of involvement with TWiki will be at that level to start with: suggestions, problem reports, and minor code fixes. I do expect our use at work to continue to grow and it is possible we might attempt something more ambitious. For example we have written our first plugin (but don't believe it is generally useful so we haven't shared it).

Why do I want to do it?

My initial goal is to submit some fixes to the GenPDFAddOn that resolves Item2929 and Item2638. I was going to submit some patches but I see the prefered approach is to update the plugin directly. I suspect we will uncover other bugs and hopefully develop fixes that resolve them. With approval, I will be a position to check those into subversion and share them with the community.

Please let me know if there is additional information you need.

-- Contributors: RickMach - 28 Sep 2006

Discussion

This project can always use someone that can fix a bug or two and keep the many plugins up to date. I support.

-- KennethLavrsen - 29 Sep 2006

Me too.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 29 Sep 2006

Welcome to the world of TWiki plugin development, you are a nice addition to the TWikiCommunity with your background. I think you will pick up Perl quickly since you already speak some languages. BTW, TWiki was my first Perl project.

I think SvenDowideit will add you soon to the project.

-- PeterThoeny - 30 Sep 2006

Hi Rick, I've added you to the SVN premissions - welcome to the TWiki development crew

-- SvenDowideit - 06 Oct 2006

Welcome aboard, Rick!

-- SteffenPoulsen - 06 Oct 2006