Allan's Footblog

Keep a diary of what you're hitting, what's frustrating you, and your goals.
Post Reply
User avatar
Tjuggles
Flower Child
Posts: 1746
Joined: 27 Mar 2005 20:03
Location: Wellington, NZ
Contact:

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Tjuggles » 12 Dec 2015 15:04

Hello.

I'm not sure if that last reply was based on another conversation that happened elsewhere, but terms like 'little' and 'big' are relative. In my opinion maintaining the entire footbag forum for the community world-wide is not little. It's big, really big.

I don't think there is anything wrong with hacking away at little projects; that is more than a lot of us do, myself included (unfortunately). I hope to stop making excuses about why I am not participating more in the near future (i.e., post-PhD) and help out this community, the coolest community in the world.

Do you think your motivation being on the wane is related to getting older?
TJ Boutorwick

"You can do anything" -Greg Nelson

janis
Post Master General
Posts: 2707
Joined: 29 Dec 2005 18:46
Location: Australia

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by janis » 12 Dec 2015 16:22

I think the distinction comes from the scope of the work more than the impact. I think running the forums here has a massive positive impact for the community and for that I'm really grateful, I know there's a lot of thankless work that goes on behind the scenes to keep something like this running. Specifically in many cases when things run well people notice less of the behind the scenes details.

I suspect some of this follows on from some of the conversations we had lately about the state of software and technology in the footbag world. I certainly don't want a situation where you felt I was pressuring you to work on something or feel bad for not working on group software projects. If things came across this way I would like to apologize for communicating poorly. Being a professional software developer I know that small projects are qualitatively very different from bigger ones. The freedom and autonomy you get from working on smaller projects is much of the joy of doing those smaller projects and I would hate to deprive anyone of that joy. For this reason I think that monolithic software projects are inherently wrought with difficulties and should be avoided where possible. Aside from being completely at odds with the general philosophy of the community I don't think the community would be well served by a monolithic "enterprisey" application. I think that would both kill developer motivation and would therefore be ineffective. Put simply we are busy people and the time investment to get contributing in such a project would be prohibitive or at the least demotivating. In much the same way the unix tradition has gone I think much progress can be made with smaller pieces of software that deal with specific tasks and specific tasks only. The task for us developers in the footbag world I think would be well served by a similar philosophy. Making more modular and focused software is certainly something I could improve on with my project and I fully intend to given the chance. If we have clean APIs that allow us to make these smaller applications be able to interact with each other without being coupled to each other we can make great progress. If I am to work on some projects I want the interfaces to be very easy to use for other developers, the only tricky part about that is that it's fairly hard to know what people are working on.

Hopefully it's a bit clearer where I'm coming from. Keep up the good work, the footbag community is that much better for your enthusiastic presence.

boyle
Post Master General
Posts: 3146
Joined: 19 Sep 2007 23:42
Location: Canberra, Australia
Contact:

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by boyle » 13 Dec 2015 00:18

You do a whole lot, we would be in trouble if you weren't around. I think that big picture stuff is a lot harder to quantify the value of the work in "growing the sport" in a sport that has not had any significant growth in a looooooooonnng time. More people like you would make things much better.

User avatar
Allan
Posts: 933
Joined: 30 Aug 2003 20:44
Location: Victoria BC

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Allan » 31 Dec 2015 23:08

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

I'm gonna try to play lots this year :)

Thanks to everyone here.

User avatar
Asmus
Ass Moose
Posts: 3773
Joined: 13 Jun 2004 08:18
Location: Copenhagen
Contact:

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Asmus » 04 Jan 2016 00:18

HAPPY NEW YEAR CHAMP!!

I hope to play more this year as well.

And thanks for all your hard work this year!

User avatar
Allan
Posts: 933
Joined: 30 Aug 2003 20:44
Location: Victoria BC

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Allan » 06 Jan 2016 22:40

Testing 123

User avatar
C-Fan
Rekordy Polski
Posts: 11366
Joined: 23 Jan 2003 23:51
Location: Denver
Contact:

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by C-Fan » 07 Jan 2016 09:03

Image

User avatar
Allan
Posts: 933
Joined: 30 Aug 2003 20:44
Location: Victoria BC

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Allan » 25 Jan 2016 11:24


Kylescook
BSOS Beast
Posts: 477
Joined: 14 Jun 2014 06:14
Location: St.Louis, Missouri

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Kylescook » 25 Jan 2016 15:54

the description on the last video says "The last clip of me is sonic osis > inspun osis BSOS". It looked to me like Double Spinning osis>inspun Osis. I thought Sonic was Gyro one direction then Spin the other direction. Did I see it wrong? Or am I wrong about the definition of Sonic?

Edit: Oh yeah, And great video. Far Symp Rev Swirl x4 was cool. And I always love your runs full of spins
Kyle Cook
St.Louis
My Footblog
My Challenges

User avatar
F[uns]tylin' Eclectic
Post Master General
Posts: 4092
Joined: 05 Feb 2010 19:53
Location: Drumore, PA

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by F[uns]tylin' Eclectic » 25 Jan 2016 17:47

I thought it looked like Double Spinning Osis> Inspinning Osis, too actually. Still, the video was super tight. Your Spinning game inspires me so much. I think I'd like to try something like Torquescrew> Inspinning Osis soon. That seems fun.

You ever messed with stuff like Spinning Mobius or Spinning Vortex? It seems like your downtime is good enough and your Double Spinning is beyond good enough to hit those. Keep posting, man.
Nick Polini

Footbag is good for the SOLE

Funblog

"Yeah dude it's all mental. Then it's physical" ~Evan Gatesman

User avatar
Allan
Posts: 933
Joined: 30 Aug 2003 20:44
Location: Victoria BC

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Allan » 01 Feb 2016 15:27

Y'all were right; was double spinning osis, not sonic :oops:

Yesterday:
PS oh yeah, forgot to mention that I just changed into a fresh new pair of g-units; the forest green ones. The session before last (Zeppelin) was the very first time I'd laced them up; brand-spanking new. To me, there's nothing quite the feeling of brand new shoes.

User avatar
Tjuggles
Flower Child
Posts: 1746
Joined: 27 Mar 2005 20:03
Location: Wellington, NZ
Contact:

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Tjuggles » 02 Feb 2016 01:11

Rippin' shit up!
TJ Boutorwick

"You can do anything" -Greg Nelson

Kylescook
BSOS Beast
Posts: 477
Joined: 14 Jun 2014 06:14
Location: St.Louis, Missouri

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Kylescook » 02 Feb 2016 06:26

Oh man. I just screamed fuck yes at my computer like nine times out loud. That Stepping Ducking Butterfly Zipper (xbdy toe)>Twirl is one of the coolest links I've ever seen.
Kyle Cook
St.Louis
My Footblog
My Challenges

h0ag3yb3atZ
Egyptian Footgod
Posts: 1161
Joined: 03 Jul 2008 09:05
Location: Shaolin
Contact:

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by h0ag3yb3atZ » 02 Feb 2016 09:35

damn allan, great stuff lately. I slack alot on watching footage these days but you're stuff is essential.
Kevin Hogan

BSC

User avatar
C-Fan
Rekordy Polski
Posts: 11366
Joined: 23 Jan 2003 23:51
Location: Denver
Contact:

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by C-Fan » 02 Feb 2016 09:41

Digging all the blenders and symple twists both sides!

User avatar
Allan
Posts: 933
Joined: 30 Aug 2003 20:44
Location: Victoria BC

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Allan » 10 Feb 2016 09:58

First of all, thank you for the replies to my thoughts about where I'm at these days contributing to footbag. Your perspectives helped a lot. It's kind of funny that I wrote what I did only a couple of months ago now, and that when I wrote it I actually knew that a relatively major change was coming for me. As of January 1st, I've been on a temporary two month lay off from my regular day job. Going from 9-5 M-F while doing some web stuff in my spare time, to having all day every day to basically do whatever I want ... very cool.

I can't say that I've absolutely made the most of my time off, so far. I'm naturally a somewhat lazy person; I don't have huge ambitions in life, and I struggle with motivation. I didn't really make a plan for the 8 weeks other than to decompress from 4 years working in the service industry, and to try to do some things that actually interest me. I will give myself some credit, however, since I have been quite productive on the interweb side of things. I've been working on 4-6 websites simultaneously:

1) My Mom has a business selling the glass art she creates and we built her an all-new commerce site with all the bells and whistles. There's not a lot of custom design work on this one; we mostly just used out-of-box tools. But it's been fun consulting with her on it and getting a very usable site up in a very short period of time. Product shots are ridiculously difficult to capture consistently; especially small, multi-layered, shiny glass jewellery. I'd post a link, but it's not quite ready to go live yet.

2) James Holkko, the same former-net-player who lent me his old Mac Mini to use for the Video Archive Project is running a pretty big project with his wife Juliet Pendray (also a former player) who is a mycologist (fungus biologist). They're building a species database of the entire South Western British Columbia region, and I'm their tech guy, translating their vision into a website. It's been a fantastic experience so far, and I'm looking forward to that being published at some point this year.

3) Jeremy Kumbruch is one of my oldest friends. He gave me my first pair of lavers. He runs a radical used bike shop here in Victoria. I've been managing that for him for many years now, but I've been spending a fair amount of time upgrading the site recently to use modern CSS and responsive techniques. It was using media queries from, like, 2009. What's fun about this site is that Jer uses his iPhone almost exclusively to manage it. His usage would make a great case study.

4) I'm almost afraid to talk about this one. There are so many moving parts, I'm a bit overwhelmed. But it is easily the project that makes me happiest :D There is still sooo much room for things to change dramatically, but we are finally making leaps of progress on the biggest project for Footbag (capital F) going right now. My doubts and fears are falling away the more I talk to people. I've reopened a dialog with Steve and he's been incredibly responsive. I've joined the IFPA marketing committee and, while I've not yet been able to send the email I want to so send to that group, I think I'm basically operating within the organizational goals set forth by Nick & Wiktor & Ilkka et al.

Footbag Worldwide is being completely redesigned. I don't think very many (none? 1-2?) of you understand what a massive, massive undertaking this actually is. The complexity of the system and services it provides are much greater in scope than you would first imagine. It is NOT a rinky-dink thing that is easy to manage. Most web developers--professional software engineers--would look at the code base that has accumulated and struggle to understand it entirely. This is a website that has been online since 1992. Let me say that again: footbag.org has been online since 1992. It's been growing for 24 years. This isn't the place to break down its components, but please just trust me when I say that it is no joke. Some of it is written in PHP, like, v1. If you understand the term "technical debt," imagine two and a half decades worth of it.

We're likely going to be making some dramatic changes. Some services may go away entirely, some will go away for a while while they're completely re-written in modern languages & protocols. We're still debating the technical feasibility of it all, but at the same time, I'm not sitting still while the details get hashed out either. I've been in full out mockup mode, prototyping & building new designs and restructuring the information architecture of the site. I'm currently making good progress. Some folks have seen some of it already, but I'm not ready to make any links public just yet. I think it's shaping up to be the best work of my career :)

5) modified?? What's happening here? I don't know. Nothing? Something needs to happen soonish, but I don't really know what. I've been making tiny tweaks here and there, and I have some basic thoughts about some stuff:

A) Props likely aren't ever coming back. It's so far down the priorities list now that it's not even really there.
B) Badges are still an awesome idea that I want to support, but I want to decouple that app from modified. I've got some fun ideas for that project, but not a lot of time. This is one of those projects that will get a micro-burst of work done on it some random day when I'm bored of everything else.
C) I don't want to deal with the banners any more. I'm going to remove them.
D) Maintenance. phpBB needs to be upgraded still. I've actually upgraded a few times now on a development server to test everything, but the theme support just isn't quite there yet. I estimate this can happen at some point in the next, say, 4 months or so, but I'm not in a giant hurry to do it. Things work.
D) What does the future hold? How does the .org redesign impact the existence of modified? I don't think it has to at all, but an opportunity presents itself to this section of the community that hasn't been available before, and I think we're ripe to maybe transition to something else entirely. None of the content of this website will ever go offline. That is my pledge to the modified community. I'll pay for the domain and hosting in perpetuity if necessary. But the words "archival" or "museum" are concepts worth exploring, I think.

As you can see, I've stepped out of my self-imposed sidelines role that I've been in for almost a decade now. I'm excited, a little scared, and feeling very hopeful for 2016. I'm intentionally talking about all of this in my personal blog so as to control the scope of the discussion at this point. I'm not exactly prepared for a rush of input from all corners, but I also need to get it out there that change is happening; fuck winter, SUMMER IS COMING.

boyle
Post Master General
Posts: 3146
Joined: 19 Sep 2007 23:42
Location: Canberra, Australia
Contact:

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by boyle » 10 Feb 2016 13:01

You have a lot on your plate! Can't wait to see what you come up with. Just want to say thanks in advance for what will be a massive project on the .org business.

User avatar
Sporatical_Distractions
registered sacks offender
Posts: 4510
Joined: 12 Oct 2004 19:14
Location: Guy's American Kitchen & Bar

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Sporatical_Distractions » 10 Feb 2016 13:12

Awesome Video Allan!

It's always great to hear about life/footbag updates as well. Keep on keepin on brotha!
Welcome to Flavortown

Kevin Crowley

User avatar
Asmus
Ass Moose
Posts: 3773
Joined: 13 Jun 2004 08:18
Location: Copenhagen
Contact:

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by Asmus » 11 Feb 2016 00:09

I rarely say this to grown men on the internet I have never met, but I think I just fell in love with you.

Can't wait to see what the future holds.

User avatar
F[uns]tylin' Eclectic
Post Master General
Posts: 4092
Joined: 05 Feb 2010 19:53
Location: Drumore, PA

Re: Allan's Footblog

Post by F[uns]tylin' Eclectic » 11 Feb 2016 05:51

Don't worry, I'm just as excited as you with the projects and I've been hard at work on my end. Cool to read about the other projects. I have a deep interest in the mycology species database, by the way. Please update me when that is finished, because I already love it. Thanks for helping me out with my end of the marketing. I'd honestly be up shit creek, drinking shit water and playing shit water polo without your help. Keep up the good work.
Nick Polini

Footbag is good for the SOLE

Funblog

"Yeah dude it's all mental. Then it's physical" ~Evan Gatesman

Post Reply