Curtis Rueden

Curtis Rueden directs the software development efforts of LOCI. He is the principal architect of ImageJ2, and the current maintainer of the Fiji distribution of ImageJ.

Community support pledge

The ImageJ community generates a lot of support activity! Forum posts, bug reports, chat room messages, and mailing list threads, and more. I want to help, but it’s rather overwhelming, especially taken together with new development efforts and collaborations that are always ongoing.

If you are reading this, perhaps you have posted issues or support requests that have gone unanswered for weeks, months, or even years. I want to change that, and am working on process improvements to make it easier for the core ImageJ2 team to respond to every support request within one work day:

• Better component status overview. The site status.scijava.org is a developer-oriented view of the status of every component in the SciJava Bill of Materials, especially components built on pom-scijava. I am expanding the scope of the component table to include a summary of support requests, issues, pull requests, etc., per component, in a way that will foster accountability for the people maintaining each component.

• Community Fridays. In the meantime, starting in 2022, I am personally focusing every Friday on answering support questions. I can’t keep up with everything, but I can try to make some small impact by responding to as many requests as I can. Unfortunately, until the status.scijava.org work is complete, I won’t always succeed in prioritizing items in a fair order, but I’m doing my best.

What is Curtis working on?

Last updated: 2022-Apr-18

Weekly allocation of effort

Day	Focus
Mon	Meetings and mentorship
Tue	Immediate priorities
Wed	Review and merge PRs
Thu	Project management
Fri	Community support

Immediate priorities

1. [with Amandine Tournay] Python from Java. Use PyImageJ from inside the Fiji desktop application. And respond to the thread in detail when progress is far enough along.

2. [with Mark Hiner Update ImageJ-OMERO to OMERO 5.5+ (imagej/imagej-omero#107, scijava/pom-scijava#173, scijava/pom-scijava#122).

3. [with Mark Hiner] New pom-scijava release:
   • Update all community projects to not use log4j (scijava/pom-scijava#179)
   • Update all community projects to 19.04 JHDF5 (scijava/pom-scijava#181)
   • Get labkit into Fiji (scijava/pom-scijava#183)
   • Finish fixing javadoc.scijava.org (scijava/pom-scijava#130)
   • Catch up on component release backlog (see status.scijava.org table)
   • Make the mega-melt (scijava/pom-scijava#146) fully work.
   • Fix failing CI builds:
     • imagej/pyimagej
     • scijava/jgo
     • imagej/tutorials
     • axtimwalde/mpicbg
     • imagej/imagej-omero
     • imagej/imagej-opencv
     • fiji/H5J_Loader_Plugin
     • fiji/Kappa
     • Update CI-related docs on imagej.net

4. Fix the fiji-builds CI workflow.

5. Finish the imagej.net statbox feature (related issues).

Project management priorities

1. Continue populating the project board for SciJava+ImageJ2+Fiji migration to Java 11 and 17 (roadmap).

2. Finish revamping status.scijava.org (scijava/status.scijava.org).

Short-term priorities

• [Summer 2022] (with Stephan Saalfeld) Migrate ImageJ2 and Fiji to ship with Java 11 or 17 (roadmap), with a Maven-based ImageJ update site generator to simplify creation and maintenance of update sites.
• [Autumn 2022] (with Gabriel Selzer) SciJava Ops + ImageJ Ops2 (roadmap), including JPMS/Jigsaw modularization and migration of SciJava foundational libraries to Java 11.
• [Winter 2022] Make ImageJ Server work again (imagej/imagej-server#41, scijava/pom-scijava#133).

Medium-term priorities

• GitHub issue reporting plugin. The Fiji BugZilla and ImageJ Trac are now static content only. The Report a Bug plugin needs to send reports to GitHub instead. (scijava/scijava-plugins-issues-github)
• Integrate PyImageJ with the ImageJ launcher. (see also this forum discussion)

Longer-term priorities

• Rich Image. Improve the ImageJ Common data model to support metadata (e.g., spatial transformations) as a first-class citizen. (imagej/imagej-common@rich, imagej/janelia-hackathon-2016)
• SCIFIO blockization. (scifio/scifio#283)
• ImageJ Launcher. Switch to a JavaFX-based native launcher. Retire the current ImageJ Launcher. (imagej/imagej-launcher#33)
• ImageJ Electron app. Shared memory between Java, JavaScript and Python. (imagej/imagej-electron-app)

Recommended development tools

So you want to be an effective software developer? Use tools!

Tool	Purpose	Plugins
Eclipse	Super powerful Essential for navigation of large projects Supreme code completion Super useful debugger	Vrapper	Vim-fu inside Eclipse – almost as good as the real thing
		Enhanced Class Decompiler	Automatic decompilation when browsing classes in Eclipse
Vim	Great editor. Crazy fast macros	Vundle	Manage your vim plugins like a boss
		vim-sensible	Defaults everyone can agree on
		vim-airline	Lean & mean status/tabline that's light as air
		vim-fugitive	A Git wrapper so awesome, it should be illegal
		vim-repeat	Repeating supported plugin maps with "."
		vim-surround	Quoting/parenthesizing made simple
		See also my .vimrc
Zsh	Awesome shell – even better than bash	zgen	Lightweight plugin manager
		oh-my-zsh	Your terminal never felt this good before: git - awesome git completion and aliases mvn - mvn completion, highlighting, aliases vi-mode - vi on the CLI vundle - manage your vim plugins z - stop cding your life away And much more
		zsh-syntax-highlighting	Syntax highlights commands as you type them
		zsh-history-substring-search	Better command history navigation
		zsh-completion	Even more and better tab completions
		See also my .zshrc
Git	It is worth the pain, I promise	myrepos	Commit, push & pull across repositories en masse
		See also my .gitconfig
GitHub	If you don't have a GitHub account, you don't exist
Maven	Build reusable software components

See also:

• The Dotfiles setup guide
• Key developer tools on this wiki
• LOCI developer getting started guide