[Jython-dev] Committer nomination - James Mudd

[Stefan R. <ste...@gm...>]

Hello Jython devs,

I would like to nominate James Mudd to become a Jython committer.

James is working with Jython since several years and he is frequently
contributing since about two years. If you take a look at the commit
history, a siginficant amount of recent contributions came from him.
On the issue tracker he frequently tracks down the source of issues quickly
and reliably. Often enough I had a look at some issue and James had already
posted an idea or even an explanation for the cause. Most recently I
remember #2672 "Integer formatting emits two minus signs with -2^31". I
also remember how we collaborated on the super challenging #2536 "deadlocks
in regrtests due to StackOverflowError in finally block". He is friendly,
easy to work with and discussions with him are usually very helpful.
I have met him personally at Diamond Lightsource and worked with him for
two days on Jython and JyNI. At Diamond Lightsource he has been using
Jython in a production environment for several years. In his own words:

"I would consider myself primarily a Java developer using Python where it
fits best. I have enjoyed contributing to Jython in my spare time,
primarily because it makes you take a deep look at areas of Java you
normally don’t look too closely at. The bugs I have enjoyed fixing the most
have been, #2399 which turned out to be caused by a change in the algorithm
used by the JVM to implement sorting of collections, and #2639 which was a
bug in comparing Java and Python collections, it required quite a bit of
work as the equality concepts offered by the two languages differ slightly
but making the interoperability of Java and Python is what makes Jython
such an interesting project. I am also interested in JyNI as potentially
this can bring powerful libraries such as NumPy and SciPy to Jython and
therefore Java."


I asked James to write a brief bio:

"I graduated Warwick University UK with a PhD in Physics in 2014. Since
then I have worked at Diamond Light Source (DLS), initially in a science
role but quickly moved into a full-time software position. I am now a
senior software engineer working on the GDA (Generic Data Acquisition)
software, used at DLS for control and automation of user experiments. GDA
is a Java application with a client server architecture, it embeds Jython
as a way to automate complex experiments using scripting, this is how I
first became interested in Jython."


- Stefan