[patrickkidger]

I wrote a JAX-based neural network library (Equinox [1]) and numerical differential equation solving library (Diffrax [2]).

At the time I was just exploring some new research ideas in numerics -- and frankly, procrastinating from writing up my PhD thesis!

But then one of the teams at Google starting using them, so they offered me a job to keep developing them for their needs. Plus I'd get to work in biotech, which was a big interest of mine. This was a clear dream job offer, so I accepted.

Since then both have grown steadily in popularity (~2.6k GitHub stars) and now see pretty widespread use! I've since started writing several other JAX libraries and we've turned this into a bit of a foundation for a JAX sciML ecosystem.

[1] https://github.com/patrick-kidger/equinox

[2] https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax

[trostaft]

Hey, diffrax is cool by the way. I've used it to do some automatically differentiate through some ODEs for optimal experimental design. Great stuff.

[VirusNewbie]

It is very cool to see that this sort of thing still happens. I love stories of people who wrote software to scratch an itch, for curiosity, and for the sake of just making something cool and useful and it turning out well for them.

I too did a fair bit of open source before ending up at G.

[PartiallyTyped]

I am a big fan of Equinox! It inspired a library I wrote for a previous employer for a stochastic simulator! :D