Greetings,
I really like how this list encourages introductions of people that are new to the development community. It's nice to see where other people are coming from.
A few years ago, I started working on the open source project, Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org). Asterisk is an open source telephony applications platform. It is most often used as a typical phone system, but it is really a toolkit where we try to make it possible to do whatever you want to with a phone call.
While in school, I started working part-time for Digium, the company that sponsors Asterisk. I have been working full time for Digium since January of 2007. I now hold the position of Senior Software Engineer, and Open Source Team Lead.
About a month ago, I visited New York University's ITP program. I was there to meet people that had done some extremely creative projects that involved Asterisk. I was looking for new ideas, or things that I could work on to make Asterisk easier to use as a part of a larger creative project. Whlie I was there, I briefly met Hans-Christoph Steiner. He gave me a quick rundown of pure-data as we walked down the street. We chatted about how there could be some interesting applications between Asterisk and Pd. So, I have been looking at it since then.
I have since written a Jack interface for Asterisk so that I can hook up any number of phone calls to other applications that support Jack. I am currently trying to figure out how to make a Pd patch to do it. :)
While learning about Pd, I have started making some contributions to the source. I have been reading code to learn how things work in Pd. Along the way, I have been making little fixes to problems as I notice them. I am "russellbryant" on the sourceforge patch tracker. Most of my changes so far have been little bugs in string buffer handling. However, I do have one sourceforge patch pending that fixes a remotely exploitable stack buffer overflow (marked as private so it can only be viewed by project members).
I'm interested in commit access, if and whenever other project members would feel comfortable with it. Mainly, I'm just interested in using it for smaller bug fixes that are obvious enough for direct commit. I am now starting to look into the implementation of the various parts of existing jack support in Pd. It may be nice to be able to work on any larger changes in a developer branch or something. (However, before I started committing anything, I would like to help draft a patch workflow document, that describes what gets committed where, when, and by whom, so that I can ensure that I don't step out of bounds. Please let me know if something like this exists, and I missed it.)
Anyway, thanks to everyone who has contributed to Pd. This is a really cool application. I hope that I can contribute something useful to the project.
-- Russell Bryant