Support the Artists to Support the Arts - The Consortium

Programming is a master craft. Videogames are works of art. I understand that’s an argument that will have to be made, but I’m prepared to make.

Oh, don’t worry. “Prepared to make it,” I said — not “about to make it.” I’ll save that for another time.

The Consortium is all about making and distributing works of art…but that’s still a long way away. Right now we’re in the building stage, and we’re building it on our crafts. And this week my programmers have been superstars.

Web Development

Last Sunday after Toby, Sean, and I got together to work out our applications development plan. Toby — a master programmer in pretty much any language — taught me to script in Python, and he remains a dedicated advocate for the language. He prefers Python for nearly all of his application development.

Sean didn’t have a lot of experience with it, though. So even though he was anxious to participate, we kept having a hard time figuring out how to start.

Sunday’s meeting was a solution. We got together so Toby could introduce Sean to Python (which, of course, went way faster than it did with me). While we were at it, we came up with an initial distribution of labor, and a pretty solid development plan for the next two or three months.

Before he left, though, Sean reminded me that he is already an accomplished web developer, and he’d be happy to keep helping out with that in any way he can. So we scheduled another meeting (just him and me this time), and I got to work coming up with work for him to do.

That meeting took place Wednesday, and it was a huge success. We fixed four major problems with my webpages, and since my webpages are the only interface between the Consortium and the public right now…well, that’s kind of a big deal.

We’re also dramatically improving the capabilities of the underlying webserver, by upgrading from cheap webhosting to a virtual server where we’ll build the entire architecture ourselves. That’s no small feat, but it gives us incredible flexibility and power.

And in support of that, we’ve got another big meeting scheduled for next Sunday with Kris thrown in this time, and the goal is to have the whole thing up and running by the end of the day. It’s going to be a lot of fun (and ripe with potential).

Web Design

We also patched a huge hole in our skillset this week with the addition of a graphic designer to our team. I might be a little early making that announcement, but Elyssa, a coworker of Sean’s, volunteered to help us make a professional logo to replace the mess at the top of this page.

She hasn’t made any major commitment to the Consortium yet (and I’m not trying to speak for her), but even providing that one design is an invaluable service. I met with her Thursday to discuss potential designs, and I came away from that meeting thrilled at the possibilities. She’s fun to work with, she definitely knows her stuff, and she seemed really excited to contribute.

I can’t wait to give her a page of her own under About the Artists, but I should probably discuss it with her first. Still, things are looking a lot prettier around here (or will soon, anyway).