Having developed tech and leading project tech teams for a lot of my life, I see this thread as sincere people describing the same thing, but from different perspectives. I will say that what Thomas does is nearly superhuman... the complexity of Nerd is its greatest strength (flexibility and power), but that makes documenting it difficult. Honestly, this is why so little of our complex technical world is done by single artist creators anymore. The two other common options for creating complicated things are a company/corporation or a free software project. I'd love it if Thomas opened Nerdseq code as a free software project, where he'd accept pull requests. But that's entirely his choice.
That said, what if the manual was on Google Docs, or as markdown on Github? That way those of us English speakers, or who have technical writing or editing skills, who want could make proposals? It's a bit of a slog but I suspect some of us would be happy to help. Overleaf is also used by big scientific teams to collaborate on writing and format. A bit crazy and unlikely to work, but something like MediaWiki could use the discussion pages for us to work out how to document. But what's clear to me is that an ODT file in github is not going to allow us to make contributions.
Finally, @chriswest and @Manbearpig, in any big technical system (think a bit of music hardware, a programming language, or even a library) the amount of documentation produced unofficially is usually exponentially higher than that produced by the dev team. Thinking of Python or Javascript: countless books, videos, university courses have been created, and the official documentation is just a grain of sand on the beach -- and very different in structure or tone from learning guides. So I hope we users can produce more tutorials! Have you thought to ask https://www.youtube.com/@Buildmusic or https://www.reddit.com/user/DSP_Kills/ to do a simple tutorial on table arpeggiation?* I think we can agree that Thomas is doing a sincere effort to make a manual that follows the logic he uses to make the Nerd, but that's not the logic most users will bring when they try to learn it. We really need translators who can do that work for him.
I have to say, if I were talking about Roland or Korg I wouldn't be advocating our contributing so much, but it's pretty clear that Thomas is a one person operation, and as such he is WAY more responsive – and substantively so – than any bigger organization I've interacted with. I've written to Malekko, Ziqal, Roland, and other music manufacturers, and none has been as garrulous as Thomas. And I've seen feature request after feature request that he has not only acknowledged but actually added. So I really think he's successfully working at capacity to create a demon of a device, and we just need some community resources. The discord channel is active!
*I have done some cool things with tables, but never the simple intuitive arpeggiation I can get on a keystep, so I just record the latter into nerd! So I would love a table tutorial as well.
That said, what if the manual was on Google Docs, or as markdown on Github? That way those of us English speakers, or who have technical writing or editing skills, who want could make proposals? It's a bit of a slog but I suspect some of us would be happy to help. Overleaf is also used by big scientific teams to collaborate on writing and format. A bit crazy and unlikely to work, but something like MediaWiki could use the discussion pages for us to work out how to document. But what's clear to me is that an ODT file in github is not going to allow us to make contributions.
Finally, @chriswest and @Manbearpig, in any big technical system (think a bit of music hardware, a programming language, or even a library) the amount of documentation produced unofficially is usually exponentially higher than that produced by the dev team. Thinking of Python or Javascript: countless books, videos, university courses have been created, and the official documentation is just a grain of sand on the beach -- and very different in structure or tone from learning guides. So I hope we users can produce more tutorials! Have you thought to ask https://www.youtube.com/@Buildmusic or https://www.reddit.com/user/DSP_Kills/ to do a simple tutorial on table arpeggiation?* I think we can agree that Thomas is doing a sincere effort to make a manual that follows the logic he uses to make the Nerd, but that's not the logic most users will bring when they try to learn it. We really need translators who can do that work for him.
I have to say, if I were talking about Roland or Korg I wouldn't be advocating our contributing so much, but it's pretty clear that Thomas is a one person operation, and as such he is WAY more responsive – and substantively so – than any bigger organization I've interacted with. I've written to Malekko, Ziqal, Roland, and other music manufacturers, and none has been as garrulous as Thomas. And I've seen feature request after feature request that he has not only acknowledged but actually added. So I really think he's successfully working at capacity to create a demon of a device, and we just need some community resources. The discord channel is active!
*I have done some cool things with tables, but never the simple intuitive arpeggiation I can get on a keystep, so I just record the latter into nerd! So I would love a table tutorial as well.