Working with digital media in museums means I’m trying to understand two vastly different fields at the same time: technology and the humanities. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the pace of technological innovation when I’m involved in only a handful of digital projects per year. By the time I figure out how to be a decent client in, say, ordering a multi-platform mobile app using Titanium, every developer in the field has switched to new frameworks and platforms. At the Nordic Museum we mainly deal with websites and web apps, so my focus is on html/javascript. Even if we could keep our investments that that narrow (there are also Objective C, Java and Python projects to keep functional) there’s a wide range of web apps using WordPress & Drupal, PHP, Node.js and a bunch of other frameworks to maintain.
Of course I’m not doing all this myself, but I still want to at least understand what’s going on. So, my programming goals for 2017:
- try out a static site generator (done – this site now powered by Jekyll!) and explore if we can turn some old PHP/Wordpress microsites into static sites
- implement some sort of automatic testing in our html5/javascript web apps
- turn at least one of our recent museum projects into open source (in a way that’s actually useful for someone other than ourselves)
Wish me luck!
