First Studio.Co

The Interactive Work Of Jacob North

Project - Website

Production Schedule App

Working as a tech developer for a food manufacturer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I was tasked with creating a scheduling application which would comminucate up to the minute kettle information with the dozens of employees on the production floor. I leveraged website technologies and a relatively small local network. Unlike public facing web applications, the scheduling tool would not need to process hundreds of information updates or requests a minute. But the television displays on the production floor would need to keep the employees up to date as products were reorganized and completed for the day. I ended up going with Python's Django framework and it's asynchronous (ASGI) library, Channels over something like NodeJs because of what I understood to be maintainability. I've heard both sides of the argument, but it was Python's longevity and syntactic cleanliness that stood out. In May 2019, the app went into use by the team, and it became a core part of communication between the production manager who would organize daily production for his staff. Along the way features were requested and implemented, such as the ability to indicate "start times" for individual products. The server ran on an Ubuntu box and the traffic was quiet enough to run a Python server called Daphne, which is made especiialy for websocket / asgi connections. Instead of setting up Nginx for static files (CSS, Javascript) I used another Python library called Whitenoise. Future goals for the project might be to visualize statistics such as which products get made on which kettles, etc. Note: Screenshots and photographs are placeholder data and stock photo compositions, due to the proprietary nature of the company's information. Coming soon: Part 2, how I processed daily product order information from a Microsoft Excel file using the Python library Pandas and XLRD to turn spreadsheet data into database entries.

Project - Videogame

Global Game Jam 2018-2020

2018 and now 2019! The Global Game Jam's (2018) local site was hosted by Glitch.MN at the University of Minnesota, and it drew upward of 200 participants. Team Omega Alpha, aka The God Squad was fated to begin and complete a 2 player local co-op maze escape, inspired by games such as "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes". Download for Mac or PC, here!

Project - Education

Gamestart School

Details Coming Soon..

Project - Videogame

Detention Center Orientation Game

Leading juvenile detainees to design a video game and create the music, sound effects, and artwork. Techarts 2016: As an educator at Gamestart School in Ann Arbor, we took on a very unique responsibility: partnering with the Youth Arts Alliance (an organization bringing arts and education to children throughout southeast Michigan). We organized and operated an educational video game development course with four different youth detention centers from counties throughout the area. Our goal was to work with groups of detainee's to develop a video game for the sake of orientation and onboarding of future detainees (based on the current detainee's experiences and insights). Using Gamestart School's computer resources we introduced the children to tools for creating music, sound effects, and graphics. We worked with the them to write short stories for the "orienation game", and then we put their work together using Unity game engine. The orientation games were installed at computer terminals in each detention center, and an unveiling ceremony was held in honor of the children who had been a part of the project.

Project - Videogame

Hibachi Beat

The rhythm cooking game prototype integrating some fun graphical responses. More Details Coming Soon!

Project - Handmade

Eye Am You

Mural & Block Party. 1400 Park Ave. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2018. I received a donation to paint this mural, and a bunch of local people came out to hang out. The piece is called "Eye am You" ... (a little fun words there) I painted it using outdoor house paint, the heaviest I could find. At the block party the soup was provided by At Last Gourmet Foods and the sandwiches were provided by Segue Cafe . (pronounced: seg way). Some people saw it from their like 10th story balcony, 5 blocks away and stopped by. I met a nice guy who rolled through the square block that I was painting on. He had a bike, and one time he had a guitar he played. Bill I think was his name. The local firemen AND cops stopped by. The property owner who was there wanted a funny picture and had me and this cop pose like I was being arrested. Those moments are cheesy as hell, but I got passed that and played along. It was funny, and I'm glad that I have that pic now.

Project - Handmade

Screen Printing

Got the screen press and got down to business. After learning computer programming, there's always been something difficult about going back to my traditional medium of drawing. The best way to describe the difference is with the word efficiancy. ... Once you write a working computer function, you can apply it to a number of situations and watch it produce hundreds of diverse outcomes in an instant. A drawing on the other hand is just one drawing. Sure we can make a copy and print that copy a million times. ... And that's sort of where the screen printing came into play. The idea was to make my artwork more connected with it's audience. What's more connected than wearing it on your chest? And the other idea was to allow my work to spread far and wide. What's more widespread than printing (besides the internet, I guess)? The work below was done by myself, my friends, and several other sources. Each printing project was a success and the operation remains in production to this day. Drawing is one thing, and murals are another. Computer programs are a different animal. But wearable, custom, limited run artwork remains one of the coolest.

Project - Website

F* Off - Browser Extension

A rape whistle for your attention span online. setInterval(function(){ fuckOff() }, 250) $(window).bind('scroll', function() { fuckOff() }); function fuckOff(){ //Tweets with spans starting with "Promoted" $('span') .filter(function(){ return $(this).text().match("^Promoted"); }) .closest('article') .css('display', 'none'); https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/f-off/ More details coming soon.

Project - Videogame

Dont Let Her Fall In Love With You

Semi Autobiographical Dating Sim. Early Version written in Python was a command line interface game (complete with map!) Current version written in Unity with C#. Repository: https://github.com/Metajake/datingsim More details coming soon.

Project - Videogame

Roguehack

7 Day Roguelike 2018 game jam submission. Details coming soon!

Project - Website

Firststudio.Co

Thisvery.website(); I used Python web framework Django. I added a couple minor features: The first thing I had was a Python Twitter library posting a tweet with a link to the post as well as a small preview of it's content. I added this option to blog posts (on my site, firststudio.co) so you could disable it if you just wanted to update the blog post, but not announce the re-publishing. ... I think that I can already see how I could have made it better. I'm rambling. The site also has a language translator as an option which can be set from the site backend. I added a handful of languages, and I used Django's custom template tags to replace "tagged" sections of type from anywhere on the site. That feature is occasionally disabled for maintenance. Other than that, this is just a custom publishing platform for: single images (with informational properties), projects (containing those images as well as much more information about that project), and finally blog posts (which include their own content as well as a link to any existing project). Django is nice because it's familiar to me, and Python is a rather "token light" language. In my personal history of developing dynamic websites I have never had a need/requirement that I have not been able to solve within Django.

Project - Website

Website Development

A few of the various clients that I have provided website based solutions to since 2008: The Really Useful Information Company https://www.truic.com/ (CSS, Javascript, HTML) Graham Systems https://grahamsystems.net/ (Drupal, CSS, HTML) A to Z Pediatric Therapy https://www.atozpediatrictherapy.com/ (Squarespace, CSS, UI/UX) Swiss Croon https://www.swisscroon.com/ (CSS, HTML, Javascript) LeDuc Creative Co. https://leduccreative.us/ (HTML, CSS, Javascript, UI/UX) Gordan Pediatric http://gordondc.com/ (Wordpress, PHP, CSS, Javascript, HTML) And more...    

Project - Marketing

At Last! Gourmet Foods

More details coming soon.

Project - Handmade

Nice Murals

Illustrations for your environment. Details coming soon.

Project - Videogame

Dream Escape

In 2014, our team set out to develop a 2D platformer using the Independant Game Festival submission date as a deadline. We used the GameMaker Studio engine. I worked on the artwork predominantly, and Roland Jarvis worked on the coding. Check out the submission page, here.

Project - Videogame

Music Lyric Mixer

Details Coming Soon! Wrote the first version in 2011, and the 2nd version sometime between 2014 and 2015. Python written (with Pygame library) music lyric video game and mixer. Repository: https://github.com/Metajake/pli_rtj00/

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