New developer will join Synfig development since March 2018

Big news: I have made an agreement with a new developer to join our team for developing Synfig open-source animation software.

Artem Konoplin will join us in March as a second hired developer to work on most critical and highly-demanded bugs of Synfig.

I will remind that since we already have one hired developer – Ivan Mahonin, who is contributing to development of Synfig and OpenToonz. Unfortunately, the resource of single developer are not enough to cover all demands of community, so we are taking this chance to expand our team. Much thanks to everyone who donated to Synfig development and to those who are willing to provide future donations to support this initiative.

Artem is a professional C++ developer with many years of experience of freelance work. His capabilities are on par with capabilities of Ivan Mahonin (and if you follow for Synfig development for quite a while, then you probably understand what that means).

At the beginning of his work Artem will need some time to get familiar with Synfig’s functionality, it’s code base, and major problems. For that purpose Ivan will mentor him for several weeks to make sure everything is going smooth. Did I mentioned that Artem, Ivan and I are located in the same town? That’s right – that opens possibilities for offline meetings and workshops, improves efficiency of communication and also reduces risks. According to our estimations, Artem will get to full productivity by April and this is when you can estimate first results.

Finally, in respect to upcoming pitch of activity, I am planning the following steps to strengthen the project infrastructure:

• Migrate Synfig website from an old (and heavily unmaintained) CMS engine to the modern WordPress-based system. Resurrect Synfig blog.
• Migrate forums to Discourse, which will reduce maintenance costs and will improve community experience.
• Work towards providing better user support, establish knowledge base (already started).
• Introduce transparency to donation system. Think about possibilities to have additional rewards to sponsors.
• Establish regular donations to accommodate expenses of keeping new hired developer. This is going to be a Patreon-like system, but not Patreon.
• A long-term goal: rework/update documentation and migrate to ReadTheDocs.org (this is very resource-demanding task and probably won’t happen in 2018).

With all that you can expect some awesome things come to Synfig in 2018. Stay tuned for our news!