Biography | Publications

David Cole received his B.S. in Engineering & Applied Science with an emphasis on mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1989. Somewhere along the way, he was infected with the "must write code" virus; hooked on the possibility of writing software useful enough to be adopted by millions of people around the world...

Always a fan of graphics of any sort and software for the common man, he became a key developer on the team that built Visio, drag and drop drawing software for the rest of us. Visio was later acquired by Microsoft and became part of the "Office family" of applications. His most recent achievement at Microsoft was to build an ActiveX control wrapper around it so that other developers could utilize the power of Visio inside their own applications.

Since joining the Kitware team in February, 2005, he has contributed code to many projects: ActiViz, CDash, CMake, gccxml, ITK, KWWidgets, mummy, ParaView, VolView, VTK and probably others that he has since forgotten about. David has served as the CMake release manager since the CMake 2.8.3 release. Controversially, he thinks it's more important for software to work than it is for software to be open source.

A sampling of his sketches and thoughts are online here.

 

Publications