Who am I?

I enjoy giving back to the open source community, ensuring that the software I develop is free to use, and hackable/extensible. Officially an electrical engineer, and a part-time computer scientist, I specialize in safety-critical software and high performance computer vision solutions.

The open source community gives me an opportunity to develop software outside of my professional skill set, while providing free and useful software with an emphasis on openness and supporting community contributions. You can visit my personal website at www.bcastell.com, or checkout my Github profile for more details.

What am I working on?

The two biggest projects I'm working on right now which have been used both in industry and academia:

• PySceneDetect 🎥
• DVR-Scan 📼

People are free to submit bug reports, feature requests, and even pull requests to help continually improve the software while getting valuable feedback. Keeping these projects free and open source is important to me, and greatly lowers the barrier to entry for both finding a solution for these problems, as well as using them as a building block to develop other applications or products.

Why are sponsorships important?

Sponsorships allow people to show their support for my work, and associate a certain value with the work I and the other community members have produced. Basically, a way for those who find my work useful to say thank you, and also cover the costs of running the project that I pay for out of my own pocket (mostly domain names, hosting of documentation, and infrastructure costs).

What will the funds be used for?

Sponsorships will be used to help offset some of the infrastructure/maintenance costs associated with actively developing these projects. They also allow for exploration of new software/hardware products which can be used for experiments or potential improvements.

Once the total amount of sponsorships covers the running costs of my projects, I will direct users to instead donate to a charitable organization (such as the EFF or the Ukraine Red Cross Society). Any sponsorship funds that exceed the running costs of these projects will be donated to the EFF.