FreeCAD News

Wan­der­erFan, AKA Chris has recent­ly announced his retire­ment from two roles at FreeCAD: Main­tain­er of the Tech­Draw work­bench and mem­ber of the FreeCAD Project Asso­ci­a­tion (FPA) board, respon­si­ble for all account­ing and bud­get­ing work. 

Chris is a retired IT engi­neer in the trans­porta­tion indus­try. He joined FreeCAD in 2013 to sub­mit var­i­ous Uni­code-relat­ed fix­es and add some new tools to Draft (Path Array, Bezi­er Curve). In 2016, he con­tributed patch­es to resolve merge con­flicts in Tech­Draw with­out guess­ing he would even­tu­al­ly become the Main­tain­er of the entire work­bench. With time, the orig­i­nal Tech­Draw devel­op­er stepped away, and Chris grad­u­al­ly became more involved and took over the devel­op­ment of this core work­bench. This made it the work­bench we know and use today.

Chris is wide­ly respect­ed for his thought­ful input and his unruf­fled per­son­al­i­ty. He has been a steady hand in his FreeCAD roles. While we’ll be see­ing less of him, Wan­der­erfan hopes to con­tin­ue con­tribut­ing to FreeCAD as time permits.

With Chris leav­ing the role of Tech­Draw Main­tain­er, we will need more con­trib­u­tors, both writ­ing Tech­Draw code and con­duct­ing code reviews. We’d love to see some­one get involved to main­tain the work­bench. The FPA is also explor­ing var­i­ous options for doing the bud­get­ing and account­ing work Chris undertook.

As sad as we are to see Wan­der­erFan retire, we are also hap­py that he’s going to be spend­ing a lot of time play­ing with his grand­kids, doing beach walks, and cheer­ing for the Mon­tre­al Cana­di­ans team! Best wish­es for the future Chris!