I learned of Open Cascade's GSoC 2021 participation through the blog of Quaoar, named Manifold Geometry (cool name!).
Quaoar is a former Open Cascade developer who worked there for twelve years and is now a freelancer. To date, I believe he is the only OCC developer who participated to the #FreeCAD forum.
To any CAD user interested in the inner workings of CAD, his blog is a very interesting read. Of course much of it goes way over my head...
Re: gaps in CAD learning materials
For years I would occasionally get "error non-manifold" warning messages on failed sweeps on an expensive mid-range proprietary CAD software, without ever having any explanation on what the heck "non-manifold" meant.
I actually learned that when in the #FreeCAD community, because end users and developers were communicating together on the forum.
I'm certain that I am a better CAD operator thanks to it.
...Yet, some of it is understandable by mere mortals like me. 😄
His blog reminds me of Roman Lygin's old blog, another former OCC developer and now lead dev of CAD Exchanger. I used to read his posts a decade ago, and while I understood only part of them, it gave me very valuable insights on CAD inner workings that years of using CAD professionally never gave me. There is a glaring void in all the CAD learning materials I've ever come across, and such blogs are useful to fill in the gaps.
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