Zach Booth
Zach Booth Lead Software Engineer at the Automated Decision Making Group at NASA Ames Resarch Center working on SHERPA, strategic planning software for lunar rovers using MDPs and POMDPs. On the side, Zach develops indie games and loves to study financial markets.
Session
What if building an interactive scientific GUI in Julia didn't require a web stack, a server boundary, or a second language? We'll share how our team replaced a React frontend and Julia backend with a standalone Julia application for planning lunar rover routes at the Moon's south pole—rendering terrain, illumination, waypoints, solar exposure, and communications windows in one process.
The talk introduces a practical immediate-mode stack: Dear ImGui via CImGui.jl for responsive UI, and Mirage.jl for simple Canvas2D-style 2D and 3D rendering on OpenGL. Along the way, we'll cover the architectural tradeoffs, our REPL-driven workflow, and patterns applicable to geospatial viewers, simulation dashboards, instrument panels, and data-exploration tools. No graphics programming experience required.