Wow, I got a shout-out in this! "Adding real-time effects dock and automation would involve a major rewrite of the audio engine (not to mention redesigning the

Wow, I got a shout-out in this! "Adding real-time effects dock and automation would involve a major rewrite of the audio engine (not to mention redesigning the UI), something like what Joshua Haberman started years ago with the Mezzo project, right?" Indeed, Mezzo was my effort at creating a really clean API between the audio engine and UI. I'm amazed that the interviewer knew about it; I didn't get far enough to actually merge it into the main tree, and this must have been 10 years ago. (EDIT: I missed that the interviewer was Alexandre Prokoudine, a member of the Audacity team from 2002-2012!) Hacking on Audacity was how I spent a lot of my time in college (2000-2004). I was incredibly fortunate to find it and meet Dominic Mazzoni as early as I did. I had no idea the project would make it so big. When I found Audacity it was pretty much just Dominic hacking on it, and it had few users. I made a Debian package for it and Dominic asked if I was interested in helping out on the coding too. One of the coolest experiences for me was when we had an Audacity hackathon in 2005 or so. Monty (of Xiph fame) was really into Audacity at the time, and I picked him up at the airport and took him to Matt Brubeck's place (mbrubeck here on HN) in Seattle. We met up with Dominic and Matt and a guy from Germany whose name I can't remember. One funny anecdote. Audacity uses 3-space indents, which is incredibly unusual. Almost every other project does 2 or 4 spaces. Matt tells me (I don't actually remember this myself) that this was because Dominic and I had a disagreement over whether to use 2 or 4. We compromised on 3. I honestly can't even remember what side of that disagreement I would have been on. :)