Developer Appreciation Thread

General
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The reason for this thread is self-explanatory. Like many of you, the way I interact with sound has changed drastically since I got my hands on a Norns, but the hardware doesn’t mean much without the brilliant minds who gift us their time, and who create the scripts we have grown to love.

To begin, I’d like to express gratitude to the following developers, for their unique impact on the cacophony I make:

@tyleretters: fave script, Arcologies
This script introduced me to the infinite playground that is norns, and showed me how it is possible to break out of my workflow prison. To some degree, everyone in this forum has been assisted, informed, and inspired by @tyleretter’s work. Thanks!

@sixolet: fave scripts, Lepidoptery and nydl
I keep running into you in so many threads, and each one of these contributions is kind, thoughtful, and goes beyond the meaning of just “helping out”. Great human, astonishing scripts. Thanks!

@cfd90: fave script, Blippoo
I would have never known about the Blippoo Box if it wasn’t for this script, and now I can actually play with one! When I feel uninspired, this one is my go-to for creating audio snippets that I can sample and play with. Thanks!

Finally, @graymazes, for graciously transforming my ignorant use of ChatGPT into an insightful stroll along his creative path, and for lending all his technical expertise to so many conversions. Thanks!

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May I nominate @infinitedigits ? For oooooo and barcode specifically (I’ve used them such a lot) but Zack has made so many other mind-blowingly good and useable scripts.

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My thanks and admiration go to the following creators of my most-used scripts:

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It’s an interesting distinction: developer vs. non-developer
To me, there’s no such thing. Developers simply learn languages and math, which is what we all learn at some point, in other/different forms, so when I was 2-3 years old and could barely speak English, was I a non-developed English-speaker? (Or perhaps simply ‘underdeveloped’ in my capacity to speak languages in general? As a humorous aside, how come there’s no appreciation threads for the ‘underdeveloped’? It took a lot of guts to fail as much as I have in my lifetime, don’t I get some credit?! :rofl: just kidding, of course - but it’s fun to trip off the semantics of ‘developer’, ‘non-developer’, and perhaps… uh… ‘underdeveloper’… oh! and maybe there could be ‘overdevelopers’… that’d be like the developers at Apple, BAAHAHAHAHA! sorry, just had to slip that one in)

One way to appreciate developers, is to appreciate their code/development, by developing it further ourselves(the word ‘develop’, itself, implies a continuously evolving process too; even when we ‘develop’ a parcel/plot of land, the land must continually be redeveloped, otherwise, we get a poorly maintained concrete jungle, or a dustbowl, or even just farmland sterilized by waste/pollution because we didn’t develop the standards by which we develop the land).
I believe ‘developer’ is a very specific word, probably chosen for a reason: the nature of computing is always involved in a certain amount of inexactness striving to be exact, therefore, people would continually need to (re)’develop’ their relationship to it.

The developers mentioned here so far, are no doubt, among the best I’ve ever seen, too, and deserve recognition, but just want to throw out for consideration:
Lines community is no longer owned/run by monome.org, so if this truly is a ‘general’ thread, it shouldn’t be implied that we’re only talking about norns/teletype/monome-devices-based development (I don’t mean that as a complaint, tho, just a reminder)
On that note, I suppose I could say from my personal witness: @tehn, @graymazes, @galapagoose, Iñigo Quilez, Eric Lyon, Joshua Kit Clayton, and Tom Erbe, are among the most talented I’ve seen at computer-based development, in general.

and most importantly, in the far future, it’s likely that ‘developers’, ‘composers’, ‘explorers’, etc. will be comprised of entire communities or societies.
so the most important ‘developer’ I feel the need to appreciate here is Lines community itself - much of what makes the best developed apps here is the ‘accessibility’ of use: they cater to a wide-range/diversity of users; the diversity here is very important towards informing how these particular developers have developed :pray:

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Raja,

I love the idea of the community as a kind of developer.

Having recently finished a lovely little book called A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers, I am still immersed in the vision of a planet in which the population came to its senses and reversed environmental destruction and in the process became something like a fundamentally sane entity.

Projecting lines into the future, maybe far, maybe nearer, I could see a role for such a collection of thinkers, makers, “developers,” and especially “carers” in the redesign of what it is to inhabit this still beautiful rock hurtling through space… It seems more likely for solutions to come to light in this kind of shared space than in a solitary bunker…

Anyway, I too am most grateful for all the amazing creativity and the sharing thereof around here. You all rock!

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Thanks for chiming in. This thread is merely a thank you to ANYONE who, in whatever capacity, builds tools that the artistic community can use without financial cost.

This is hugely empowering to artists, and I believe the “developers” (makers, designers, builders, whatever) deserve an expression of gratitude.

This thread can be nuked if it isn’t deemed necessary.

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:heart: no need to nuke at all, and i meant nothing against you as the OP personally, was just mentioning as a way to keep the general thread as open-ended as possible moving forward :heart:

i guess you do have some influence over how i think about it, though, since you started the ChatGPT that led to the OnsetSlicer thread: in such a context, you are actually part of the development of OnsetSlicer(you programmed ChatGPT by chatting with it :smile: …i realize that’s not a definition people might tend to, but if you put data in, and got useful data out, then you programmed something), and you also influenced a savvy developer to think about it(so in some ways you also ‘developed’ the developer’s mind as well… and if i end up using OnsetSlicer, then you’ve developed my experience too). so you’re a ‘developer’ yourself, thanks and praise must go to you, too :pray: :raised_hands: :smile_cat:
[sidenote: i hope no one ever takes anything i say online too seriously - i just like to trip off how we both cling-to and release identity through wording, especially online: ‘producer’, ‘developer’, ‘professional’, ‘gender’, each person’s identity is a subjective experience, and so all of these words also hold this subjectivity that allows for wiggle room → we can all be a little bit of everything at some point in our lives]

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I agree with you there. It’s not fair on all the folks who contributed to successful tools (hard or soft) if we left them out after using the wrong term.

Having said that, I did originally intend to thank the script developers that enable Norns as such a powerful tool, so I have categorised the thread to reflect that.

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got one more:
i must praise @ioflow - i just recently saw, they make these moves to keep our community running in so many magical ways(definitely norns-relevant, too, since all our communication over norns is so much smoother because of them), that’s a seriously dedicated dev right there: Help out: embed tutorial - #36 by ioflow

Thank You, @ioflow! :heart:

also, Rob Ramirez, for his work on Jitter, and his willingness to remain engaged on the forums and with the community everywhere he can to keep everyone exposed to newer and newer techniques, features, and tricks. it’s just as important for a developer to be able to disseminate and share their work as it is to create it.

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13-angels

@dzautner’s work remains some of the the most visionary ui design i’ve ever seen for any class of music software

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I’d like to give a shoutout to:

  • @infinitedigits for his continuous work, troubleshooting and general awesomeness
  • @JaggedNZ for his midigrid script, that makes norns and many scripts much more accessible
  • @sixolet for the whole nb package, emplaitress and the versatility they provide
  • @Molotov for jiffy, the simple and practical looper that it is
  • @Justmat for the pools reverb, because it’s beautiful
  • @ambalek for fall, also because it’s beautiful
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