Yannis and Christos, the two Coko developers that have been working on Editoria from the beginning, have been in San Francisco for 2 weeks.
They are super people to work with. I met Yannis in the back of a taxi on the way to a mutual friends wedding in Montemvasia (Greece). It was a cool wedding, and somewhere along the way I realised he was also a great programmer. I eventually talked to Yannis about maybe working together on Coko and he was keen and also introduced me to Christos.
So, last week we did a number of presentations together to various people in San Francisco. Showing Editoria and talking about the technology behind it (INK and PubSweet).
We have also been taking the time to work at UCP together with Kate Warne and Cindy Fulton. I facilitated Kate and Cindy over this last year to design Editoria, so we took the opportunity to spend more time together and do some faster iterations.
This week Kate and Cindy iterated on ideas for an uploader – essentially they wanted to upload an entire directory of MS Word files at once into Editoria and have those files automatically populate the structure of the book. Yannis and Christos had a demo the next day and demonstrated it. We were all pretty happy with the result.
In addition, we met with, amongst others, many UCP production staff and demonstrated and discussed Editoria.
We discussed where it is now and where it is going and there were very many fantastic questions and pointers on things we need to keep in mind going forward. It was also a very cool meeting.
Finally, we are going to build out the diacritics interface, the multiple uploader, and a few other small bells and whistles to production ready code and test next week with Kate and Cindy before Yannis and Christos return to Athens on Thursday. All round, a cool couple of weeks. These weeks also reflect the ‘Coko way’ of working – having as many conversations as possible with those interested in the technologies and processes we employ, and designing systems with the major stakeholders (people who will use the system). Not only does this produce better software, its way more fun.