Development Blog

Christmas came early for the SoCreate team this past month. During our monthly all-hands meeting, our founder Justin Couto unveiled the latest version of SoCreate, and let me tell you … it is SO. MUCH. FUN. While I’ve seen the software and all we have planned for it plenty of times before, SoCreate is now at a place where we can play with it, and so far, it is everything we’d hoped it would be and more. That means Beta 1 is closer than ever. Perhaps the most fun thing about SoCreate Screenwriting Software is how easy it makes writing. You can’t help but want to tap the keyboard as soon as you see it ... Continue reading

Hi, Amber here. I'm the Lead Designer at SoCreate. My role involves crafting how users experience and interact with our products. Designers on our team must not only be able to create beautiful interfaces, but we must also have a complete understanding of how what we make will work. The design process at SoCreate is an ever-evolving thing. We operate similarly to many other design teams and companies; we often establish our best practices through trial and error. When we identify a pain point in our process, we try something different. Sometimes the new things stick, and sometimes they don't ... Continue reading

Houston, Jupyter has gone to Mars, Project Jupyter that is, via the Curiosity Mars Rover. This open-source software project, started by a Cal Poly Professor and a student, helped gather data from the second-smallest planet in our solar system and sent it back to earth to a Jupyter Notebook for processing. And as if that wasn’t cool enough, Jupyter is an incredibly valuable tool even if you’re not planning on going to outer space any time soon. It has changed the way industries get work done, ranging from university research, to space exploration, to finance, to streaming. SoCreate had the pleasure of hosting... Continue reading

Our latest Lunch Meet, a team-led learning series for which the team gathers monthly, was of particular interest to me as a content manager. Our Chief Software Engineer Jami Lurock presented an overview of Prismic, a “headless” content management system that’s powering the content of the all-new SoCreate.it. Unlike Wordpress or Umbraco, where the developer themes on the platform that’s already built and uses the language the platform has chosen, a “headless” CMS is simply an API. The front end of the website can be developed in any language you want, which in our case, is Angular... Continue reading

Hat tricks, and card tricks, and magical CSS, oh my! Our latest Lunch Meet, a team-led learning series, was full of surprises from Lead UX Designer/Developer Anthony Harris. The topic was CSS Houdini, a somewhat magical, albeit somewhat unavailable, project that could revolutionize web development as we know it. Here’s what we know. Houdini is a new collection of browser APIs that allows you to gain more access to your browser’s CSS engine. The API’s are accessible through JavaScript, making them web developer friendly. The good news? Overall, CSS Houdini would improve browser support... Continue reading

SoCreate super-intern Tim Stoddard made his second appearance at our monthly Lunch Meet team-led learning series, to give us a look at new features in the next generation of Angular, version 8. Tim’s an expert on Angular, having presented on behalf of SoCreate at the #NG Conference in April, the world’s original conference on Angular in Salt Lake City, Utah. So, we were eager to learn from him while we chowed down on catered Chipotle lunch! Tim covered several of the main features of version 8 of the Angular framework: differential loading, a detailed look at how the new Ivy renderer... Continue reading

We may be considered a small software company, but our team is doing BIG things in the industry. Microsoft just added two of SoCreate’s open source projects to its Service Fabric guide for best practices. Mark Fussell, Group Program Manager for Microsoft Azure, recently invited SoCreate’s Chief Engineer Jami Lurock to give Microsoft staff a demo on SoCreate Service Fabric Distributed Cache and SoCreate Service Fabric Pub/Sub over a web conference. SoCreate built these open source projects as a way to solve our own challenges while building the SoCreate screenwriting software infrastructure. In... Continue reading

Our most recent Lunch Meet – a SoCreate team-led learning series – may have been the most colorful yet! UX Developer Lauren Spence took the floor to teach the team about cutting edge practices being used on the UX side of SoCreate projects. While the rest of us satisfied our appetites with catered lunch, Lauren satisfied our visual senses with her presentation on the SoCreate Color System. The Color System is an innovative approach that controls and themes the colors in all of the apps we build. The system adds layers and rules on top of plain CSS, giving us a system that is easy to use, easy to... Continue reading

It’s 2019, and science fiction is no longer. We’re living in an age of science reality! Our March Lunch Meet (a monthly team-led learning series) tackled the topic of brain computer interfaces (BCI), which was just what our movie-minded team was craving. UX development intern Madalyn Pape delivered the impressive presentation, as the topic is a personal passion. Avatar, The Matrix, Star Trek and Marvel’s X-Men … now these are films about mind control that we can understand! But connecting our brain to a computer in real life? As Maddy explained, this very real technology allows our brain to... Continue reading

SoCreate makes a tradition out of supporting tech in San Luis Obispo. One reason is that we’re lifelong learners, and there is so much to learn from each other, and we also want to see the tech industry grow in SLO because that only helps us develop a more talented team! So, when two experts in their field stepped up to teach a PyData SLO workshop on deep reinforcement learning, we stepped up to provide the pizza! We also hosted this March Meetup here at our SoCreate offices. SoCreate Software Engineer John Jenson attended and reported back. Laura Graesser from Google Brain and Keng Wah... Continue reading