I'm not sure there's a way to put into words the massive contribution that James has made with the launch of the new Club website. The man is a paragon of ability and drive, and has been completely focused on accomplishing this monumental objective. With the added functionality, as well as the ability to improve and add to the site we are sure to see this work last for many years into the future. Every existing member, and every new member of this Club will be impacted by this endeavor for years to come.
Fantastic job James! Congratulations on becoming one of a select few in the Club to be awarded a Golden Lightsaber! ~ Valhavoc, Fist of the Dark Lord
The Golden Lightsaber is an award reserved for very few. Generally speaking, it has been awarded to Grand Masters upon their retirement, in recognition of their years of service to the Brotherhood. I sometimes and go look at those names that have received the award and remember all that those men have done. I see where we are today, and I can trace the progress of the Brotherhood through the line of GLS recipients. The award shows a complete lineage of the Brotherhood's greatest. But, at this moment, and until another Lightsaber is bestowed, the list is currently incomplete.
Jam3z Lucius Entar deserves a Golden Lightsaber. His name should be quickened to the list of names of the Brotherhood's greatest. Because he is one; Jam3z, our Seneschal, is one of the Brotherhood's greatest members.
Not many people can comprehend the amount of time, effort and dedication that have gone into Jam3z and his team rebuilding the Brotherhood website. I can. I understand. We have attempted to take on this feat four other times. Jam3z was there for most of them, when we tried to rebuild the site in ASP.NET, PHP, traditional ASP, and PHP again. Jam3z was witness to the failure of each attempt. The site was too big. There was too much functionality to rebuild. It could not be done with our small team of coders.
Yet Jam3z has completed the task. He has, with the help of but few others, taken our website into the next generation and preserved our ability to prosper as a club for many more years. I doubt anyone could really count the number of hours he put into this project, but if I guessed over 1,000, I may come close by half. Our website is comprised of hundreds of scripts, dozens of tools, and countless different intricacies; rebuilding it was a herculean task.
And it was just in time. The old website was on the fritz. At times it was inaccessible. It had the fingerprints of a half dozen Seneschals and the code was out-of date. For the DB to progress, we needed a solid foundation and the ability to build new and better things. Without Jam3z work, we would be stuck.
I underestimated Jam3z, I will admit. When the project first launched, I had my doubts as to the ability of the team to pull through. I am very glad to be wrong. I am thankful to be wrong. I love this club and its members and want to see it last for another twenty years. Thanks to Jam3z, we have a shot at that future.
I am certain Jam3z will continue to do more for us. This website is his to care for, maintain and further develop, so there will be more things to thank him for in the future. But right now, it's appropriate to thank him for the work he's done to date. And that work puts our Seneschal in elite company; he deserves to be known as one of our greatest members. Because, as I said, he is one.
Jam3z: Thank you for everything. I am grateful for you. Congratulations. ~ Jac Cotelin, Sith Lord
The Dark Jedi Brotherhood is an internet based club that relies heavily on our website. Its complexity attracts new members, its functionality enables day to day operations, and its unreliability is legendary. Robot hacking bots owned us, requests are lost to the internet, and pages refuse to load. BUT, all this has changed. Jam3z has led our coders on an operation that has been talked about for years, but never accomplished. The Dark Jedi Brotherhood's website and all of its complexities have been upgraded and built on a new and stable coding language that will ensure our longevity and continued existence for years to come. Jam3z work ranks in the pantheon of Dark Jedi Brotherhood accomplishments and is deserving our our finest awards. I'm proud to be a member of this request and proud to thank one of our best members ever. Thanks for all your work! ~ Darth Pravus, Sith Lord
Many aspire to climb mountains. Few ever do. Many say what they will do. Few follow through. Many make promises. Few keep them.
We have so many examples of the above I need no more words to describe them. They are all-too-familiar to us. But what is not as familiar, what may indeed require a few more carefully chosen words, is what it looks like when someone steps apart from the rest and actually accomplishes what he set out to do.
This is what it looks like when someone doesn't talk about climbing the mountain but does it. This is what it sounds like when someone does what they said. This is what it feels like when someone keeps a promise. And as you likely have innumerable examples of the former, I will give you one of the later...
James Lucius Entar Arconae.
I have had the pleasure of working with James and his team during my tenure as Deputy Grand Master. When he was hired James was tasked with one mission: Design a new and modern website from the ground up. Unlike my experience with other coders in the past, James has been ever-present during this project. In days gone by the Brotherhood was often at the mercy of coders as the technical nature of their skills was difficult to come by and their reliability and dedication often more so.
James was unique in his role. Constant updates. Constant questions. Constant improvements. James worked so hard for so long it was difficult for the Dark Council, especially Muz and I, to keep up with all his advances on this project. But the beauty of hiring and then relying on someone like James, his tenacity, maturity, and personal drive; I knew I didn't need to worry about him, keep tabs on him, or even push him to do his job.
Few realize that a leader should never have to push his people forward. Rather, he should only have to reign them in and focus them on their next objective.
With James, I had need to do neither. James did this work. And what is to be remembered is that he did not do it for the Grand Master or the Dark Council. He did not do it for promotion, fame, or accolade.
James did it for us, the Brotherhood. He did it for you, the member.
He worked tirelessly to leave something behind for all of us. So let us do what little we can in return...
James, thank you for everything you've done for us and continue to do in your role here. Please accept the Golden Lightsaber on behalf of a most grateful Deputy Grand Master, and more importantly, a most grateful Brotherhood.
Congratulations, my friend. ~ Raken, Sith Lord
The Golden Lightsaber is one of our highest accolades, and requires a 2/3 DC vote. I want to take a moment and explain why I think he deserves it.
Jam3z was given one major task since he was made Seneschal in May or 2012: Save our club from this dying site. I don't need to tell you how bad it was on the best of days. Dossiers erroring out, requests vanishing into thin air, graphics getting erased, and everything loaded far far slower than we liked. This continued to get worse over the past few years, the result of so many seneschals, each with their own coding styles and piss-poor documentation to back it up.
It was a hell of a job, akin to getting thrown into a kitchen that had not been stocked or cleaned in twenty years and told to make a gourmet meal. It's not the first time I gave that job out. I'm not the only GM to hand that job out. But Jamez is the only man who achieved the goal.
Since then, he's been methodically burning through the site code, trying to find ways to do what we do now, but in more stable ways. He decided on a new framework code, called Ruby on Rails, to do the whole new site in. This makes the code modular, and easily adaptable for future projects that we've all been drooling over for the past ten years. Rough estimates from fellow coders place the amount of work he has put in at 700-800 hours of coding. That averages out to about two hours of coding EVERY day since he was named Seneschal, no weekends, vacations, or time off for good behavior.
That is a feat, gentlemen. One worthy of our highest award.
Now here's why it's the right time for him to get this award. He's done this out of love for the club. You don't do this many hours of dirty, hard, migraine-inducing work just for a few pixels, and the fleeting admiration of a few dozen people. You don't do this for the thirty comments on the announcement that will fall off the news page in two weeks. You do this because you want to heal the club, to make it better, to help us survive into the next ten years or more. On our old site, we could all feel it coming. The end of our club inched closer with every failed dossier load. Now, we have something that gives us a much better chance to not only survive, but to thrive. We needed this, and we needed it now. Now we can hone the site, live testing showing us where more work is needed. We have the framework for a new ACC, we have framework for possessions, we have framework for projects we haven't even had the balls to think up yet because those that were already on the list were clogging up our brains.
They're all possible now, and we have one man to personally thank.
Yes, there's more work to do. No, we're not done. But I think we should acknowledge the man as one of the greats in our organization, and show him that we do appreciate him and his work.
I ask you all to stand with me and thank Jam3z for his work. ~ Muz Ashen, Dark Lord of the Sith
Lord Muz Ashen Keibatsu, 2013-07-29 04:58:50 UTC