pedkin's history
marieke
I originally wrote pedkin to help my wife Marieke Dekker with her Ph. D. research on the genetics of Parkinson's disease. Marieke was struggling with a 10,000+ person pedigree stored in a genealogical database, which she had to massage into a format acceptable for a program to calculate kinship coefficients.
Since I was refreshing my rusty C++ skills at the time, this seemed like the perfect toy project to exercise my knowledge of the new C++ standard and STL constructs.
hzanal
The first program I wrote was intended to just convert the output of the genealogical program to the input format of the kinship program. The genealogical program was called HazaData, which led me to call my software hzcvt. Later, I decided to also write a program to do the kinship analysis itself. I called that software hzanal.
open sourced
When hzanal got into more widespread use than I originally intended, I decided to GPL it, put it on the web, and give it a less silly name. Which is how pedkin came about.
