Active Artist Product Changelog

Oof, I don't even remember making the first commit at this point. It may have been so long ago that I wrote it in a JavaScript framework called Ember.js. I do remember rewriting it in React and going back and forth. At some point I'm pretty sure I built a proof of concept of the API in Rails. There have been at least 5 different Github repositories across a few different names, "Better Indie Toolbox", "Book Better", and finally "Active Artist".

Here are the links to those Ember and Rails APIs if you're curious. If you're a developer and you get them running locally, shoot me some screenshots! I'm not going to pull them up now but poking through the code it seems like I got at least a partial proof of concept of the route builder going in there.

• UI repository link: https://github.com/jmmccasland/book-better-ui
• API repository link: https://github.com/jmmccasland/book-better-api

A little over five years ago I had just graduated from a coding bootcamp after spending the first half of my twenties touring in a handful of alt rock / pop punk bands on indie labels. I invited my two booking agent friends AJ & Hayden over and bought a couple pizzas to talk about how they book and manage tours for bands and what we could do to standardize and improve parts of the process.

We landed on a culmination of different combined and enhanced Google products to create a collaborative route builder experience that the whole band and management team could use to share contacts, manage hold requests, and stay in touch with the constant movement a tour takes during the booking process.

Click here to view the original Figma file.

Since then Active Artist has evolved, shut down, restarted, and pivoted a handful of times. Along this journey I've learned so much about engineering, design, solving actual problems, and the proper order of events when building new software.

Moving forward, our goal is to build tools for the live music and arts community and partner with bands, booking agents, record labels, and other cool people and groups to build the future of music technology.

The next several entries of this changelog will also be retrospective of decisions and progress made along the way starting from 2019 to now.