Projects

This page showcases some of the publicly visible projects I am involved in or have worked on in the past. I will start listing the most recent activities but there are probably some things from my past that might be worth mentioning as well. Will add as I find the time.

Material for MkDocs

As of October 2023, I am a collaborator on Material for MkDocs, a theme and set of extensions for MkDocs, a static site generator. With Material for MkDocs you can produce professional static websites with ease by authoring them in Markdown. Customization and flexibility are provided through Markdown extensions, the ability to mix in HTML where needed, and the plugin architecture of MkDocs.

While the original use-case for static site generators is the production of documentation for software products, Material for MkDocs shows how they can be a light-weight alternative to a range of other systems that serve to manage content.

For example, I have used Material for MkDocs in teaching to produce extended lecture notes and tutorials. This worked much better for me than traditional alternatives, which would have been either Microsoft's Office products or a learning management system. Another use case is websites - this site was built with Material for MkDocs.

At the moment, I am helping to overhaul the information architecture for the website and documentation for Material for MkDocs but I am also doing some community support and am getting more involved with the ongoing technical work and product development.

Rights-Driven Development

Rights-driven development, or "RDD" for short, is the idea of letting peoples' rights drive software development. It comes out of a critique of the state of contemporary software engineering, which favors speed of development and avoids any kind of up-front analysis.

In a discussion paper, I have argued that the methods we use in software engineering impact social outcomes, including (human) rights outcomes. Traditional responses like technology ethics, value-sensitive design or technology laws fail to address this. Consequently, I decided to work on RDD as a way to better integrate a consideration of rights into software engineering. Inspired by the Gherkin language often used in Behavior-Driven Design, I am developing a language for representing rights and tools to ensure these rights are reflected in designs and verification processes.