https://mikejfromva.com/tags/retrospective/ Recent content in Retrospective on Mike's Software Development Blog Hugo en-us Fri, 08 May 2026 20:36:09 -0400 https://mikejfromva.com/post/retrospective-2013-beam-viewer-controls/ Fri, 08 May 2026 20:35:00 -0400 https://mikejfromva.com/post/retrospective-2013-beam-viewer-controls/ <p>In 2013 I published a paper titled <em>Beam Viewer Controls at Jefferson Lab</em> through the <a href="https://www.icalepcs.org">International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems (ICALEPCS)</a>, held that year in San Francisco. The paper details a complete rewrite of the control system software responsible for managing beam viewer devices on the 12 GeV CEBAF particle accelerator at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia.</p> <p>You can read the paper on ResearchGate: <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258420808_BEAM_VIEWER_CONTROLS_AT_JEFFERSON_LAB">Beam Viewer Controls at Jefferson Lab</a>. There is something genuinely satisfying — and very cool — about searching for your own name on a research database and finding a published paper staring back at you. For an engineer who spent years in the trenches writing C++ and debugging hardware signals, seeing that work preserved and indexed alongside physics research from around the world is a quiet kind of thrill.</p>