Hi, I'm Neil, an independent software developer and consultant from Oxford in the UK. My focus is on real-time systems, real-time programming, media, embedded and tools on the JVM. I've been passionate about open-source software for over 20 years, and lead on and help maintain a range of projects. I'm also a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

In 2019 I founded Codelerity to provide development services and advice related to the various open-source projects I work on. You can support my work by hiring me to help you via Codelerity or by sponsoring me here. Your support directly translates into more of my time that can go into developing and maintaining these projects, and helping them thrive.

Featured projects

PraxisLIVE / PraxisCORE

PraxisLIVE is a hybrid visual live programming IDE, rethinking general purpose and creative coding. PraxisLIVE is built around PraxisCORE, a modular JVM runtime for cyberphysical programming, supporting real-time coding of real-time systems. With a distributed forest-of-actors architecture, runtime code changes and comprehensive introspection, PraxisCORE brings aspects of Erlang, Smalltalk and Extempore into the Java world ... a powerful platform for media processing, data visualisation, sensors, robotics, IoT, and lots more!

Apache NetBeans

I've been a developer working with the NetBeans platform and IDE for some time. I've been involved in the Apache NetBeans PMC since its donation to ASF, and am particularly active in the release process, alongside UI work and general bug squashing.

I provide a range of community installers for Apache NetBeans, bundling a local JDK runtime for a better OOTB experience. For these, I developed NBPackage - a tool for building native installers of the IDE or any platform application.

GStreamer Java

gst1-java-core is a set of Java bindings for GStreamer 1.x. GStreamer is an open-source, pipeline-based multimedia framework written in C. It allows a programmer to create a wide variety of media-handling pipelines inside applications, from simple media playback, to encoding, live-streaming, analysis, machine learning, WebRTC and more. The Java bindings are in use in a wide variety of commercial and open-source projects, across desktop, server and embedded.

I started the project in 2015 as a fork of earlier GStreamer 0.10 bindings that I'd also helped maintain, and have led development and maintenance since.