CalligraphyJapan: a site for shodo (and my mom and her friends)

Introducing CalligraphyJapan!

I'm Soph (aka @sopipip), a high school senior in the USA interested in computer science, making websites, and other things in that realm.

My mom (her artist name is Hakusui) has been practicing Japanese Calligraphy (shodo) since she was in elementary school! After all those years, she still belongs to a traditional calligraphy school and practices with her cohort regularly - their sensei just turned 90-years old!

The problem is that the school is kind of old and not with the times. They still mail (not email) paper newsletters and don't even have a website. My mom and her friends talk about displaying their pieces online, but that's been a problem. Whenever she would start a website to exhibit her art, it soon fell abandoned because posting was too hard / 面倒.

Nostr to the rescue!

One more thing: my dad (@fibonacci) is also interested in coding. It's not his job, but he used to be a webmaster, whatever that is ;) The two of us have been pairing together for about a year making websites and coding simple programs. He started using Nostr last year and suggested that we could try building with it.

When my mom told me she wanted something easy, I thought Nostr would be a great tool to get her started. I spent about 10 minutes getting her set up on Damus, recorded her keypair, and showed her how to use it to post pics of her calligraphy from her iPhone. So far, so good. She's posted a few pieces in the last week.

Svelte & NDK for the MicroBlog

Using VS Code on my MacBook, I was able to easily start a Svelte project. After I got a few pages in place, I imported NDK (nostr-dev-kit) and was able to quickly connect to relays and pull events. And that's just the start of what we can do.

Now that my mom is on Nostr, all she has to do is take a picture of her art and post it to her feed. The site we're building pulls her posts from a private relay and exhibits them beautifully.

But we have more in mind. Not only do we want to add the ability for visitors to react (and zap!), we also plan to allow her friends to post their pieces too! This means that my mom has to show her friends how to get onto Damus (or some other client) - I'm sure she'll ask me for help. We'll see.

After talking to my mom about what she wanted, we put an plan together.

We use Trello and Miro to update our plans for the site visually, which has helped us organize our thoughts and stay on track. We commit our code semi-regularly (calligraphyjapan repo) and work in one-week iterations (sprints), some weeks better than others depending on my homework, college applications and social life. It's been okay.

Pairing, Hacking, and Presenting at Nostrasia

Things have moved surprisingly fast since July when we started playing around with Nostr. We had already decided to visit Japan for Nostrasia, but I thought we'd only be spectators. After all, building with Nostr was easy, but we're no super-programmers.

Then my dad saw McShane's call for speakers, and he asked me if I wanted to challenge myself and get in front of strangers showing off how we pair to learn and build stuff. I'm not sure why I said yes, but I did and here we are getting our sites finished and our presentation primed.

I was the one who saw the Hackathon posted, and I pitched it to my dad. We decided to use CalligraphyJapan, and we actually waited so we didn't start until October. We might not finish everything by the deadline, but we've already got a working site (CalligraphyJapan.com) and an enthusiastic artist who now has an outlet to show her works. The goal is to extend the site out to the other artists in mom's shodo community and have them all contribute to CalligraphyJapan.

頑張ります!