Artemis @Skymake

DevOps with ♥ #Docker #GatsbyJS #Java #Serverless. Member at @Skymake.

Jul 22, 2019 - 4 min read

Today I wanted to share the current direction of the website and development of it up until now. I had considered the alpha version of the website to be when it was run purely on development environments. This was where I spent a few evenings picking a method of website creation and hosting before digging my teeth in. I ultimately chose GatsbyJS as the safe option for my end goals with static site generation to address some concerns of functionality which were addressed in some of the platform's self-descriptions. It was interesting learning, as learning always is, the bits and pieces of developing the front-end of a website and seeing many heavily used tools and paradigms from the modern developer community.

In the later half of that week I began familiarizing myself with my currently acquired tools and picking up the essence of React and how my components ultimately end up as web pages and ui elements by touching up the site. Then after having at least one one segment of content and a few pieces of functionality I desired, I launched the website within the week. Since then I have considered the website in beta, and not just because I need to troubleshoot a feature or two here or there after launch. The sole reason that I have considered the website to be in beta is due to my vision for it!

I had desired to implement interactive labs for my readers which requires a larger amount of prep on my part since I needed to provide this functionality within my budget for the website. This site currently has pretty much a blog without functionality. I did consider it reasonable to launch it in blog format, as according to Agile philosophy the development focus should be on facets of your product you can continually display to your audience as a standalone feature. However after pulling the idea of Skymake from the Nether this website shall decidely be for the purpose of developing the Skymake platform in its primary medium, and I look forward to the day I can declare it complete and relay its access to creators.

I suppose however that a truly modern view in Agile perspective doesn't consider a product to be in alpha or beta or any kind of development. Instead it may be better to consider key micro-services within a product, the cogs and gears that make the program work, and their relative completion in differing stages of development. Micro-services could be the objects under scrutiny by Agile philosophy; to be determined if in a development state or not, when it is in a state consumable by an audience.

Direction of Skymake

Skymake itself is currently in the design phase under a few very well-equipped young developers. With their unique experience and tooling they can provide a very insightful design in terms of video game mechanics and the encoding of rather extraordinary gameplay feedback loops. They have begun reaching out to several investors and start up accelerators who they mostly deem that a creation like Skymake would have the biggest impact and benefits to, and who share similar vision or at least vision whose pathways converge for a large part of the way.

Word from the Team

The accelerators mentioned include those offered by cloud providers, although the EdTech Accelerator for AWS quickly backed out of our reaching out without asking for any additional information from us and deferred us to come back in six months, sharing with us a person of contact among Amazon whom they encouraged us to collaborate with. It was a surprise they got back to us so quick. It was the weekend after our Friday night submission, we were expecting within the edge of 10 business days as they stated. We were appreciative of being informed so quickly rather than being discouraged. It's just more clear now what path to travel with this project and what the first things are that we should present when reaching out to large corporations. It should be spelled out how clear the benefits of Skymake's mission are to certain corporations along with the large number of people who benefit, as well as that the whole scope and all the metrics and analysis we can easily accomplish should be shared.

It is a bit annoying to experience firsthand one of the biggest companies with the most resources, standing to receive the biggest gains from this original project, with a particular start up accelerator program designed for pushing innovations in the Educational Technology Industry, immediately takes distance at a time when we really need the support to be able to work full-time on such a beneficial idea.

We are currently fleshing out several important subsystems for Skymake although we are polishing them as stand-alone services along the way. The magic system is being refined and prepped as two open-source projects, one for software to assist educators, students, and project managers in presenting graph-theoretic ideas. The second micro-service is forming into another project that would assist both modern software developers in full-stack development and embedded systems engineers.