Meet our 1st ambassador in 2024, Baptiste Mélès

We are delighted to introduce our 1st ambassador in 2024.

Baptiste Mélès is a researcher at the Henri-Poincaré Archives, in a unit dedicated to philosophy and research on science and technology. Therefore, a significant part of his job is to study source code, using a philosophical, linguistic and historical approach.

Some days leave a lasting memory. For example, the first contact Baptiste had with Software Heritage was precisely on January 22nd, 2015. It was the very first session of the “Séminaire Codes Sources”, which he founded and has been co-organizing for ten years in Paris, with Raphaël Fournier-S’niehotta (Cnam), Lionel Tabourier (Sorbonne Université, LIP6) and now, with Emmanuel Chailloux (LIP6, IRILL). In this seminar, speakers were invited to read and discuss source code and coding practices. At the seminar, Baptiste met Stefano Zacchiroli, Software Heritage CTO, and it became clear for Baptiste that he shares Software Heritage vision.

If you want to know more about how Software Heritage products can be used in a daily research workflow, then you should ask Baptiste who heavily relies on the archived source code and also chases gems to be preserved. For instance, he recently archived Georges Gonthier’s 2005 formal proof of the Four Colour Theorem in Coq. Baptiste is also an enthusiastic swh.fuse tool user as it allows him to browse source code with his favourite tools: viz. Ranger, a command line file manager, and the text editor Emacs. And you can also count on Baptiste if you need explanations on how to use the archive’s interface. It’s true that Software Heritage has many entry points: one can start with a project name, a given file, an origin URL, a SoftWare Hash Identifier (SWHID), etc. As an ambassador, Baptiste can help you master the tools to get a systematic view of Software Heritage main features.

Baptiste is part of the very early adopters of Software Heritage and is convinced that software preservation is a shared concern across academic fields.

If you want to contact him or to learn more about our mission, he will be happy to answer you back!

Don’t forget! We are looking for enthusiastic organizations and individuals to volunteer as ambassadors to help grow the Software Heritage community. If you too want to become an ambassador, please tell us a bit about yourself and your interest in the mission of Software Heritage.