Today we're joined by Simon Christ who is "the computer guy in a biological department". Moving from rock solid C, advancing to C++, he discovered Julia when he had been frustrated enough by his prior programming experiences. Simon has fixed the PGF backend for Plots.jl and as time goes by found himself among the current project leads. Simon shares with us his experience about maturing and maintaining a foundational package in the ecosystem and why now it's the right time to work on a major version update. We also talk about the Plots.jl publication, the importance of reproducible science and package maintenance, and which colors should not be on plots.

Simon Christ is a research software engineer at the Computational Biology department of the Institute of Cell Biology and Biophysics at the Leibniz University of Hannover. He has obtained a PhD in theoretical biological physics in 2020. Simon is one of the maintainers of Plots.jl, one of the most well-known plotting libraries in Julia. He has also published a paper about Plots.jl in the Journal of Open Research Software.

Plots.jl: https://github.com/JuliaPlots/Plots.jl

Plots.jl paper: https://doi.org/10.5334/jors.431

Plots.jl Zulip channel: https://julialang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/236493-plots.2Ejl

Simon's Github account: https://github.com/BeastyBlacksmith

Huge thanks to Jürgen Fuhrmann and the Weierstrass Institute Berlin for hosting Simon and Chris during the recording.

Jürgen's homepage: https://www.wias-berlin.de/people/fuhrmann/?lang=1

Weierstrass Institute's homepage: https://www.wias-berlin.de

Recorded on: 2025/01/14

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

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