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I came into contact with the Sago Liederschule when I was searching for a community with deep musical aspirations. I tend to get disconnected from my creativity sometimes when I'm more in my logical brain, so having people around me that fully embrace the art of writing a song is so inspiring and needed for me.
After my first seminar with them, Matthias approached me with some ideas about their website. They wanted to have something a bit more modern and structured compared to their old side but most importantly there was a need of formalizing the application process.
Up until now, everyone who was remotely interested in the school would contact Matthias via Mail. Which had given him a pretty good idea of what people want to know and how he could hand off a bunch of manual work to an automated process.
An interesting idea was to model their application process similar to a sales pipeline. New applicants would be "Leads" providing some example songs and lyrics. The team of 4 would then assess whether the lead is a fit, eventually inviting them to one of their seminars.
After some research we found that a full blown customer/application relation management system would be way too much overhead for this process. Mostly due to the pricing structure of CRM services or the maintenance/operation implications for self hosted systems.
For a day or two I was really tempted to write a fully customized web app for their process. A tool automating the application process and that would also allow them to manage their students and when they are invited to which seminars... though this would certainly be a fun thing to build it would effectively install me as an non-replaceable maintainer – not a role I like to hold on a pro-bono project ;)
So after those considerations we eventually landed at a standard Wordpress Site hosted on uberspace. No fancy custom theme, just the barebones which resonates really well with the schools grounded (if not understated) image. Lots of the details are already communicated on the page and Interested people can inquire more details for the seminars via an automated email. When someone applies, they fill out a form guiding them to provide the relevant details and files and those details are then send to a Trello board which the team now uses to manage their students.
For this project I wrote not a single line of program-logic and I think it's a great example for "boring" being the right thing to do. I could have easily given in to those aspects wanting to "show off" with a highly customized solution. I could have used all the latest tech I know and like. But that isn't what the project needed and most likely would also have bound me way longer and stronger to maintaining an over engineered system for a lovely group of people helping artists to write the best songs they can.