So finally I have the time leisure to start posting here and introduce myself. After some time of reading and browsing I think Sonic Pi-In_Thread is a nice platform!
I startet using Sonic Pi in 2014. Initially I was looking for a good reason to start programming more seriously than I did before. Although I had and have frequent contact to programmers in my job and did some programming in PHP and Javascript (besides website stuff which you can not really call programing) I never considered myself as a coder. When I saw a video and a presentation by Chris Ford I was very intrigued by Overtone. I managed to get it run but did not spent enough time to dive into Closure. Then I discovered Sonic Pi, which definitely has a much flatter learning curve. At this time I also had the option to give a course at Leuphana University whithin the department of Cultural Studies, where students besides other things can choose courses in audio production. So I thought having to teach is the best way to seriously start with Sonic Pi. In 2015 I gave the first course and I still continue to do so. You can find the course material online at Github.
As I am a longtime user of Emacs (although I would not dare to call myself ‘proficient’) I love sonic-pi.el by Josef Wilk; unfortunately it does not seem to support the new midi functionality in Sonic Pi 3 (which is - as I guess not a problem of sonic-pi.el but of the underlying osc.el) but I would love to see some editor functions in Sonic Pi like officially supported snippets, search, bookmarks and so on, which I appreciate having within Emacs (concerning feature request for Open Source Software see below). I might also be able to help concerning issues with Sonic Pi on Linux because I am also a longtime Linux user. I do have a Mac but I prefer Linux much more.
As I said I am more of a musician than a coder. I started to play Jazz guitar when I was 16 and continued playing in band during my early twenties. Music was always important in my life but the ‘me as a musician’ somehow lost contact to the rest of myself. Occasionally I grabbed the guitar but did not play on a regular basis. Sonic Pi was a new start for me to go back into creating music. I have also started to learn the piano but due to lack of time am progressing very slowly (which is totally ok).
I do consider Sonic Pi mainly as an instrument and accordingly I try to create the music with it I would like to listen to (so far with more or less success). As a former Jazz musician I am particularly interested in the improvisational aspects or in other words: Live Coding. That being said, my goal is basically to create interesting music (and to teach it) with code being as simple as possible. I do occasionally upload a track on Soundcloud (with ‘postproduction’); sometimes I also post my live coding exercises on Youtube. So far the tracks which point into the direction I would like to go further into are ‘Who Are You’ and ‘The Second Challenge’; this is definitely work in progress (which for me lies in the nature of the live coding approach).
As my focus is more the output (the music) and not the code (I am sure, most of what I am coding could be done much more elegantly) I put on some material collected under the working title: Sonic Pi Resources. My focus here are more or less typical challenges I (and my students) encounter while creating music using with an instrument called Sonic Pi. I might be useful for others too.
I am doing my best to propagate Sonic Pi here in Germany. I am sure there are lots of people out there who still don’t know about it but will be very interested once they are being introduced to Sonic Pi.
As Open Source Software does not grow itself and has to be programmed which involves a lot of time/work, I do think propagating is not enough if you are a regular user. I do also think complaining about bugs or requesting features while you are not contributing in a way that makes a difference is somehow not an option in the long run. So I finally overcame my deep distrust against PayPal and other online payment services (besides my regular bank account) and signed up for being a Sam Aaron patreon. I would be very glad if Sam could earn enough money from all his patreons in the near future to be able to continually and fulltime fund the developement of Sonic Pi.
Martin