Hi folks!

It took me a few weeks to get back to writing a new post, though I keep on reading most forum posts.

First, I wanted the latest post about seminar on parallel programming and Open CASCADE to stay a bit longer to let more people notice it. There were several feedbacks from the readers, all extremely positive and supportive. Many thanks again to those who replied, that was important. However, the number was still too small to justify the event so we will have to defer it for some time. There will be free webinars by Intel so those who are interested can participate online.

Many other things have been happening during this time. First, I have changed a position in Intel. My new job is engineering management of a local team that develops Threading Building Blocks and Open MP, two run-time libraries that are aimed at facilitation of creation of multi-threaded applications. Both are part of Parallel Composer, and the former is also available in Open Source. If you had been following my recent posts, I was describing my experience with TBB, which I became a fan of.

The team is quite mature and involves senior professionals, and the technical stuff is still quite of a challenge for me, so I continue ramping up. It turned out that my earlier experiments with TBB appeared to be a good upfront investment that now starts paying off. In general, throughout my career I observe that in order to successfully manage engineers you need be a good engineer ;-). You need to speak one language with people you work with.

Second, developing the ACIS-SAT translator for CAD Exchanger has also been time-consuming. The progress has been good so far and the exporter is feature complete, while the importer is mostly complete.

There were several interesting notes while working on the ACIS translator. I have adopted the Qt test framework for unit and integration testing, and was again fascinated how effective early testing can be. Indeed, the cost of a fix for a bug found during unit testing is just a small fraction of one found by your customer a few months later. I am trying to develop a discipline of having a test case for any new functionality, or even to have a test before the code is developed. An overhead that pays off in the future.

I thought what could be interesting for you, my readers. Though there are some draft notes made during last months let me try to offer you something new. I thought to share with you some techniques on surface modeling which could be done with Open CASCADE. I had not been working with it for years and don't remember many details but touched this topic now when developing translation of ACIS surfaces. So I may need some time to gather and to structure information on this topic. Answers can be slow as I will be studying some of these issues with you ;-).

So, let me start a separate series on this...