Eric Thomas Zeitler

Eric was a graphics and simulation engineer, and to almost everyone who knew him he was EBNF, a nickname earned in a compilers class at New Mexico State University that stuck so completely it became his handle for the rest of his life. He studied computer science at NMSU with a minor in mathematics and made Crimson Scholar. An avid gamer, he was one of the original and notable members of the Seek Geek gaming club, along with Jon Saenz, and was a fixture at its LAN parties.

At NMSU's Physical Science Laboratory he built a 3D terrain rendering interface in C# and OpenGL for the Army's Future Combat Systems program, modeled the tanks and drones that moved across it, and worked on UAV simulation. In 2007 he came out to Seattle and spent the rest of his career in the Puget Sound area: Peak Systems, Mpire, Dimension4, HoloHoloHey, Phacil. He wrote renderers, web systems, and whatever else the problem called for, in whatever language it called for.

His work

• 3D terrain visualization and UAV simulation for the Army's Future Combat Systems program, at NMSU's Physical Science Laboratory
• An OpenGL-based rendering engine for a document viewer at Dimension4 in Bremerton, with XAML and SVG support
• github.com/ezeitler - his code
• youtube.com/@ebnf - his videos

What colleagues said

Eric is an outstanding software engineer who worked on many of our difficult simulation and 3D problems while at PSL. It is very hard to find employees with initiative and Eric had it in spades. Frequently he'd start working at home on a project and would present it when it [was] going to be useful to our current tasking. I believe that Eric just generally loves coding and learning new programming techniques and methods.

— Frank Blecha, VP of Engineering, PSL

Eric is an unusually well-balanced software engineer in terms of his overall computer science background and the breadth of his facility with different programming environments. Eric was a great resource for me as a second set of eyes on system administration problems; primarily a developer, Eric helped me solve some system administration problems that I just couldn't have solved without his perspective.

— Adam Ott

The name

The line at the top of this page is a grammar rule written in Extended Backus-Naur Form, the notation compiler writers use to define languages and the one Eric was nicknamed after. He picked the name up in a compilers class at NMSU and never put it down: he was ebnf on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and anywhere else that asked for a handle.