Beamteam generator

Product

This is a software product for a few local communities (churches). With this software they can generate visuals to aid in their ministries.

See the open source GitHub project over at https://github.com/ErikDeRoos/koningskerk-beamteam

Context

I take an active part in ministries myself by coordinating the production of visuals. We work with a team of 10 to 15 volunteers to produce this weekly content.

It is from this work that I sought out initiatives for a good visuals generator. There are other initiatives, like full professional software packages and online services. Given our previous knowledge with Powerpoint we decided to give this tool a go.

The base product was inherited from a local initiative. It needed a few stability improvements to be able to deliver the reliability we desire so that was our first contribution to this open source software.

At the time I was employed by Luminis as a consultant and in between jobs they allowed me to work on open source software and give back to the community.

My part

I maintain this product for over 4 years now as the main contributor. The base product was inherited from a local initiative, and I build a good maintainable op-source product out of it.

A lot of under-the-hood refactor work had to be done, like introducing DI and other SOLID principles. Also the addition of unittests ensured no regression as new features were added.

I did a lot of work to get a roadmap for this product. I tried new UX, finding more communities in need of this product, tried cloud based Powerpoint generation.

All the documentation is from my hand. I added useful docs on the operation of this tool so users know the power and the limits of this tool. A lot of work went into this area.

A couple of my blogposts while working on this tool

Related stuff

Random order, tooling used

  • Github open-source project
  • GIT sourcecontrol
  • Windows Forms
  • C# .Net
  • Microsoft Office COM Interop