Mathieu Bastian has been our lead developer for more than ten years. He is now the proud father of an adorable little girl, congratulations! 🍾🎈🎉 At this occasion he decided to step down from his leading role in Gephi development, and hand over the reins to Eduardo Ramos Ibáñez.
Mathieu has been the true architect of Gephi’s source code. Not only is he its most prolific author, but also the engineer reflecting on its structure, drawing its blueprints, and building the foundations. He transformed my clunky 2007 prototype into an actual software over half a dozen complete refactorings, never drawing back from facing challenges. We owe him everything that makes it work: the ability to be installed, to be maintained, to have plugins… There would be no Gephi without him. Today is a good occasion to write thank you Mathieu for your years of service to the project! Fortunately he will stay an active member of the community – we would be lost without his invaluable knowledge on the most intricate depths of Gephi’s source code.
So who is Eduardo? Let him present himself:
I am a spanish software developer, currently living in Madrid and I have been helping to maintain Gephi for several years. I love to create interesting software and trying to push its limits, specially data visualization!
I am kind of a progressive music fan, and a cat lover 🙂
You can follow or contact me on twitter @eduramiba
Eduardo is the person who knows best Gephi’s source code after Mathieu, and it is only natural that he is the next in line to lead development efforts. You already know his work since he almost entirely developed the data laboratory, but as often an important part of his contribution is not so visible – maintaining the source code, fixing this bug… This is how he became an expert of Gephi development over the years. He is now developing a new OpenGL engine for Gephi 1.0. Welcome Eduardo, and thank you for stepping up to this new role!
If you want to know more about the situation and future of Gephi, we wrote about it in this blog post.
Gephi blog 
Just curious if the new Viz-Engine is going to be further developed, or is going to remain dormant because of a new direction?
The new viz-engine is still being developed, and regardless of possible new directions for Gephi, it will be released for the v1. We are slow, of course, but it is not dormant per se. You can actually try it by building the right repository on our GitHub. https://github.com/gephi/viz-engine