With the end of the year rapidly approaching, I thought I’d take a quick survey of the happenings at Crunch Technologies over the last year. To be completely honest I haven’t posted anything to the blog in over 6 months so this is also a bit of a catch up.

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is when I get to “do what I do” in some of the finest labs in the world. One of this year’s highlights was an on-site build of a booster stage at Imperial College—many thanks to Jon Marangos and his group http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/j.marangos. I closed the year with a few hours in Hiromichi Niikura’s lab at Waseda University in Tokyo http://www.f.waseda.jp/niikura/en/indexE.html. As always, I’m very grateful to work with all of our customers. Many thanks to you all and I look forward to seeing many of you next year!

The biggest company news of 2018 was the addition of Luke Charbonneau as Head of Product Design in October. Luke has been a brilliant shot in the arm to the Crunch product development efforts, bringing with him a background in ultra fast lasers, fiber optic technology and software development. In particular, Luke has a passion for open source software that aligns very well with the company initiative of making most, if not all, of our software open source. 

As the open source community and culture has matured, we find more and more of the productivity and IT software we use is based on (or is entirely) open source code. We think scientific software should be no different. Moreover, we believe that embracing the open source development path is the best way to produce the highest quality products for our customers. Making our software open source ensures that our customers will be able to apply their own expertise and creativity to modify the software and (if they wish) release it to the broader community. We are certainly looking forward the challenge of keeping up with our customer’s mods and extensions!

This is the point where the overly hyped statements about next year’s product offerings would normally be inserted, but that’s not really our style. Instead, I’ll just mention that we will be introducing new hardware products next year and we are excited to see how our customers will use them. We’ll also be regularly pushing our code and updates to Github with more details regarding that forthcoming in the next few weeks.