Pouet, increasing with stability
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by Analogue
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by Analogue
Interlude
The year when Pouet was published, was the same year first iPod and the first Harry Potter movie hit the street. Also Wikipedia came out same year, but the difference between Wiki and Pouet was that the first post on pouet in year 2001 was in french. 10 years ago there was an interview (hugi #35), but Laurent aka Analogue is also a huge Amiga fan we believe. We also believe he's liberal in the twist and turns the scene is moving but lets find out if we think we know him...
Who is the man behind the Pouet hat? Is it as we believe, any Amiga hidden in the coat?
Just the regular geek, I grew up with Amstrad, Atari, Amiga and PCs in the country side. Not a surprise but Amiga is my all time favorite platform: it's a pretty well balanced piece of hardware and my all time favorite demos are on it. It's so obvious to me: I owned an Amiga 500 Plus after owning an Atari 520STF.
Nowdays I just do infrastructure stuff, helping devs do their job, you can follow my stuff at http://www.glop.org/
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From the start, did you know that Pouet had potential to grow, or did it just happen?
It kind of happened. When I start a project (Pouet, Mackup) it's usually that I'm looking a tool and I don't see anything to do the task. In the case of Pouet, I was enjoying watching demos, but we were in the ages of FTP, and it was a pain to follow up with what was released and where to download it. I also wanted to see what other liked, especially hidden gems, without having to ask anyone on IRC, especially since the scene is full of biased people
Pouet was an attempt to solve those 2 problems: discovery and recommendation.
So I started it as a database of cool demos shared between french sceners on IRC, and it grew organically.
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The maintenance of Pouet 2.0 was a shift. Was it hard to hand over your baby?
Yes and no. At some point over the years, my focus went elsewhere, and other sceners took over the source code to fix some obvious bugs and annoyances. Then the whole site has been refactored while keeping the original design, all thanks for Gargaj / CNS. He's the current maintainer. The migration to Pouet v2 (the current version) has not been easy technically, but also in terms of organization.
But it was more of a misunderstanding and you can now contribute to the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/pouetnet/pouet2.0
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Where do you think Pouet will be in 5-10 years? That would be the time when we are around 35-55+ and some of us are titulated grandpa's ?
Ironically, same as now, following the evolution of the scene, and I don't see it evolve much over the years
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Bonus question: what do you think I should have asked you?
What will happen to Pouet if I die? (spoiler: nothing, legit people can take it over).