Greetings to HN! I am very proud to have been featured in HN at least twice. I take inspiration from a quote last year from Nellie Kroes - European Commissione

Greetings to HN! I am very proud to have been featured in HN at least twice. I take inspiration from a quote last year from Nellie Kroes - European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. She's an iconic fighter for Openness - goes on Spanish hack camps with 14-year olds. Hopefully accurate: "I'm 71. I don't do this because I have to but because I want to". [PMR was also 71 at that stage]. I take "hack" as a very positive concept - from its roots in MIT and the Hacker Manifesto up to HN and "hackdays" and "hackathons". I started my communal chemistry code ca 30 years ago - in FORTRAN - and it's gone through C++ (including f2c), and now Java. There have been six major revisions of JUMBO. I had the major epiphany about 15 years ago when I was writing molecular display in Java3D (argh!). I realised I didn't have to do this all myself - and so integrated the magnificent Jmol into the system. That led to the culture or sharing the load and fighting the battles communally (standard chemistry software is awful, highly prices and restrictive - one company will sue you if the publish the output FORTRAN log file). I shan't give my life history , but I have been incredibly fortunately to find like-minded collaborators both locally and globally. Locally it came from Jim Downing who just us about 9 years ago and showed us how to use all the right ideas and tools (JUnit, maven, Jenkins (CI), Bitbucket, Stackoverflow, agile (stand ups, dojos, etc.). The great thing was that we shared the load. We met at the Panton Arms every Friday lunch and would often work there in the afternoon. Yes, work - where ideas would flow freely. The core of hacking is not writing the code but working out what needs to be written. We are committed to excellent software, not competitive academic impact-factor points. That meant we could do things properly. FWIW our work has gone into Cambridge Chemistry's submission for the evaluation process. We're proud that many of our tools (OSCAR, OPSIN, ChemicalTagger, JUMBO) are robust and distributed without major maintenance need. This is unique in chemistry. As a result I catalysed a unique - zero-cash community - the Blue Obelisk (http://blueoblisk.org http://blueoblisk.org and Wikipedia). 20+ F/LOSS groups work in unplanned parallel ways and have created some of the best chemical software. We are now moving into a major effort to extract all scientific facts from the current literature (contentmine.org just released). The major challenge will be lawyers. If any Hackers want to take part in knowledge liberation we'd love to hear from you.