Producer vs writer - zlist video player

My vocation is to produce useful software. Hand writing was always a constraint, not a feature. I know all too well the necessity of finding a way to pay for the labor of producing the software, but I've long been passionate about producing software that helps people who could not afford to hire me to create what they need.

I started writing code in 1985 - on paper, because the cassette drive of the used TI-994a my grandmother gave me didn't work. Around 2002, I started the journey of guiding work that was delivered by a group rather than an individual - my first taste of building something bigger than any of us could accomplish on our own. In 2015 I first spent my own money to hire subcontractors to build software I wanted to produce - it was painful to grapple with how little I could accomplish with the bootstrap funding I was scraping together from doing consulting work.

This weekend I was invited to give a talk at short notice in another city. I wouldn't be able to travel in time, so I agreed to give the talk by video conference. Because I enjoy dabbling with live event production, I've always wished for a video player that I could use while giving talks that let me more easily manage my own media/images/slides while smoothly switching back and forth from the camera. I've built countless personal studio rigs over the years with many different software and hardware switchers and playout solutions, always way too expensive and complex for me to ever recommend that someone else use them.

I wondered how far an agent could get on building this type of thing today. I started the project Friday night, and Saturday morning gave the talk using my own custom player and virtual camera. This motivated me to continue, so the entire player was ported (full rewrite) from macOS to Windows in the afternoon. A little polish here and there as I thought of things on Sunday. I have been producing software, personally writing code, and managing large projects for a long time, and I'm still grinning like that 8 year old kid at the realization of the software I can bring into the world on a shoestring budget now. If you want to try out this little video player it's at https://kindlyops.github.io/zlist-releases/