Open source software

A list of the more mature Open Source projects in which I have or had a major involvement. Several other projects are on Github.

OCMock is an Objective-C mock objects library. With the flexible Objective-C runtime it took only 200 lines of code to implement the essentials. Two decades later, following widespread use and the addition of many features, the codebase has grown a bit.

In 2023 OCMock won an Open Source Peer Bonus award from Google.

CCMenu

Mac application / Swift & SwiftUI

CCMenu shows the status of builds on CI/CD servers in the menu bar. It started as part of the CruiseControl project that built the first CI server ever. The original implementation in Objective-C was tied to the CruiseControl API standard. A complete rewrite in Swift and SwiftUI laid the foundation for supporting more servers types.

Trying to avoid the well-known SaaS commenting systems I had settled on an open source system I could host myself. When development stopped, and I really didn't want to maintain a Rails app, I decided to write a minimal commenting system from scratch.

A reinterpretation of the Maeda Wheels screen saver I wrote over twenty years ago (see below). This version stays closer to the illustration in John Maeda's book that served as my original inspiration. It's a bit smoother and efficient, too.

When Thoughtworks went through the brand refresh in 2021 I took that as an invitation to write a new company screen saver. (I had written the previous one, too. See Dancing Glyphs below.) The new screen saver animates one of the illustrations that were created as part of the brand refresh.

In 2016, when reading Cixin Liu's novel The Three-Body Problem, I saw a shape in our brand asset library at work that had three of the typical ThoughtWorks glyphs superimposed, and somehow I thought, what if those three glyphs were dancing around each other like the suns in the novel? Wouldn't that make a great screen saver? Things got a bit out of hand when I started implementing the idea.

This is a small screensaver I wrote in 2001 after reading MAEDA@MEDIA. At the time my PowerBook Pismo was a bit too slow to render this at acceptable framerates but now it looks as lovely as it was intended. The actual animation depends on the mouse position. So, be surprised by new patterns each time, or move the mouse while the screen saver is active.

Neo is a framework for .NET developers who want to write enterprise applications with an object-based domain model. It is well suited for domain-driven design and agile development. Neo includes tools that create an extensible object-based domain model as well as the database schema from a an abstract description of the model. At runtime, rich schema information is used to dynamically generate all SQL required for object persistence management.

A collection of frameworks for Mac OS X, GNUstep and WebObjects. The Common framework provides advanced data structures, socket wrapper classes, a lightweight XML DOM implementation, and other goodies. The Message framework covers internet messages (in the sense of emails and Usenet postings).

I came across WordNet while writing my thesis and since there was no client for the platform I was using at the time I wrote one. In the following years Marcus did a great job porting it all the way to Mac OS X.

In 1995 Constantin asked me whether I wanted to join him in his effort to write a good Usenet newreader for the NeXTSTEP platform; something that was desperately needed at the time. A while later we released Alexandra 0.8, which became a huge success and was at times the most popular newsreader for NeXTSTEP.