The Political Physicist

 The ramblings of a left-wing research software engineer…


Software

I enjoy programming and have a variety of projects which I share on GitHub. A selection of some of the most notable is described below. I mostly program in Fortran (for numerical projects) and Python (for most other things).

Futility

This is a collection of Fortran utilities which I have written. At the moment it is fairly sparse, but I hope to be adding more components to it over the summer. These will (hopefully) include a system of error-handling, routines for manipulating paths, routines for interacting with the file-system, and some common data structures.

FORD

An automatic documentation tool for modern Fortran programs. This software extracts information from comments and the structure of your code itself in order to generate a set of HTML pages describing the API of your program. I wrote it because Doxygen, the most widely used automatic documentation tool, does not work well for Fortran, while ROBODoc can not analyze the source code at all, thus relying completely on comments. Furthermore, both of these projects use non-standard markup languages, whereas I wanted one which could process comments written in Markdown. Various configuration options are available for FORD and more will be added over time.

markdown-include

A small extension which I wrote for Python-Markdown. Originally this was prompted by a feature request on my FORD project. It allows the contents of an external Markdown file to be placed within those of the file being processed.

backdrop-theme

The Pelican static site generator theme used for this blog. You can clone the repository and generate it using Grunt and Sass, or you can clone the Pelican Themes repository and use the pre-built version available there.

C. MacMackin
I am a research software engineer, writing code for scientists working on fusion energy. I am also an active member of the Prospect trade union.