ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Merry Chrismas to all who observe! Today, we dive into the world of Makie.jl with its core developers, Simon Danisch and Julius Krumbiegel. We explore the origins of Makie, its unique design philosophy, and its role in shaping the future of visualization in Julia. Simon and Julius share their journeys into Julia, the challenges of building a flexible and performant visualization framework, and their vision for Makie’s future—including ray tracing, higher-level APIs, and integration with the broader Julia ecosystem.
Simon Danisch began his studies in Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück in 2010, specializing in computer vision and machine learning. In 2012, he discovered Julia as a language that combined high performance for interactive computing, seamless GPU integration, and an elegant alternative to object-oriented programming for mathematical applications. Julia has been his primary language ever since. While working with C++ on machine learning projects in 2011, Simon identified a need for interactive, user-friendly tools for data visualization and model parameter manipulation. This inspired his Bachelor’s thesis, where he developed an early predecessor to Makie.jl—some of which remains in use today. Since then, he has made significant contributions to Julia’s graphics, GPU, and plotting infrastructure, and is the author of numerous related packages.
Julius Krumbiegel joined the Makie project in 2019, where he developed its layout system (GridLayoutBase.jl) and many of the GUI objects originally part of the standalone MakieLayout.jl package. With a background in psychology and vision science, his work focuses on 2D plots, visual quality, and usability, including Makie’s default themes, plot recipes, text and figure layouting, and vector graphics output via CairoMakie.jl. He is also the author of several widely used Julia packages, including Chain.jl, DataFrameMacros.jl, ReadableRegex.jl, Animations.jl, and SankeyMakie.jl.
Makie's website: https://makie.org/website/
Recorded on: 2025/11/25
Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann
Editor: Stazi
Find us everywhere:
https://juliadispatch.fm
https://github.com/JuliaDispatch/
https://www.youtube.com/@JuliaDispatch
https://anchor.fm/s/fc63539c/podcast/rss
