Marcus D. Hanwell

1787 points
Marcus D. Hanwell
Rexford, NY

Marcus D. Hanwell | Marcus leads the Open Chemistry project, developing open source tools for chemistry, bioinformatics, and materials science research. He completed an experimental PhD in Physics at the University of Sheffield, a Google Summer of Code developing Avogadro and Kalzium, and a postdoctoral fellowship combining experimental and computational chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh before moving to Kitware in late 2009. He is now a Technical Leader in the Scientific Computing group at Kitware, a member of the Blue Obelisk, blogs, @mhanwell on Twitter and is active on Google+. He is passionate about open science, open source and making sense of increasingly large scientific data to understand the world around us.

Authored Comments

I couldn't agree more, this is something we look at when hiring and is something mentioned in more head hunting emails these days. Open source allows you to build up a verifiable portfolio of your development work that has been tested in real projects that are actually used too. There are also the warm fuzzy feelings you might experience from giving something back to the wider community.

When using Git (or I would imagine other distributed version control systems) then it is largely about choosing which hosting location should be writable. It is very easy to then mirror to the other services for redundancy, and as many of them provide free hosting for open source projects why not use them to mirror your repositories?