OpenMarch is Moving Fast in 2025!

Battle testing OpenMarch

This past season, I had the pleasure designing and running the visual program for Lightridge High School’s indoor drumline. This was their inaugural season with an indoor percussion program, and it was my inaugural season teaching one. When I was asked if I could write drill for the group, I selfishly found it as the perfect opportunity to put OpenMarch through its paces.

I was building the plane while I was flying it. Whenever I thought “ugh if only I could just put the marchers here,” I would open up my code editor, add the feature, and push it to the main build. This was the inspiration and initiating event of creating the fully customizable grid builder.

Making changes on the fly

One of the most liberating things was being able to change dots in real-time during rehearsal. As many indoor educators know, visual design is often has many in-the-moment changes. The visual ensemble is small enough for you to just manually place people on the floor, but it can get tricky when you’re trying to remember where you put everyone. Carrying my laptop around the floor to drag-and-drop each marcher as I changed dots let me keep a source of truth that I could check back to.

Rarely was I found in rehearsal not carrying my laptop around, cradled like a baby

Using OpenMarch to run rehearsal

Something I didn’t expect, which I hope to dig into later, was using OpenMarch as a rehearsal runner. In the early drill stages, we’d often sync up our learning to a recording of the music. When dealing with a 5-minute recording, you have to keep a small slice of your brain reserved for memorizing time stamps or rewinding just the right amount. While not a huge deal, having OpenMarch open and connected to the long ranger let me easily show the students what the move looked like, demonstrate how it went with the music, then use it as a backing track for the rep.

OpenMarch, on the move

Booth presence in Northern Virginia

This spring, Aleksi and I got to share OpenMarch in person for the first time at an indoor drumline show. Huge thanks to Ryan Dempsey and the Woodgrove High School Band Boosters for giving us a booth space for free. This kind of generosity is so humbling, and it means a lot to us and the project. We spent the day talking to directors, students, and designers, showing off what OpenMarch can do and hearing what people want out of a tool like this.

The most surprising fact of the day though was multiple people saying “Oh yeah, I know OpenMarch. That’s what I used to design my group’s indoor show.” I was astonished. When using OpenMarch for my own indoor group, I felt like I had to apply hack-after-hack to get OpenMarch to do what I wanted. And yet, here were multiple designers who had already navigated their way through the infant OpenMarch to get their students the dots they needed.

Silent Command visit in Austin, TX

As announced back in January, OpenMarch and Silent Command have created a strategic partnership! The Silent Command team does amazing work providing clinics and masterclasses to the marching community, and we couldn’t be happier to work with them!

Silent Command very graciously invited me to their content creation weekend in Austin, TX where I got to spend the weekend with some of the most amazing people in the activity.

Over the weekend, Olivia (my fiance) and I lived with a some of the Silent Command staff and some current DCI drum majors. Each person had their own journey to becoming a leader in their corps. Their perspective on the activity, and where it needs to go, was refreshing coming from someone who had marched the same group for four years.

I also want to extend a warm thank-you to the entire UDB team for hosting a wonderful networking event Saturday night. I especially want to thank Josh and Luke Gall for letting me talk their ear off about the wonders of drill software. Their journey is especially inspiring to me. UDB filled a gap in the activity no one else had served. It took them years of slow progress and tedious work to get the product that is so ubiquitous in the marching world. I’m inspired by their attention to detail and their dedication to providing an amazing product. The best way I can describe it is “band-director empathy.” They know what band directors need, they know how to get it to them, and they pick up the phone when someone has a problem

Words of wisdom from UDB

I would be doing this blog post a disservice if I didn’t share at least a few pieces of advice I was given by Luke and Josh, as these words fit into good general life-advice as well:

• Fail fast - Don’t wait until something is perfect to try something. Take a risk. Hear what people think. When you fail (because you will fail), stick your head up and keep going
• Always be happy to help - When someone texts you for help, answer. Even if it’s on a tutorial on your website. Even if you’ve answered the same question 100 times. One of the best ways to keep a good impression going is to be eager to get someone where they need to be.
• Be valuable - Find ways you can make something that really serve people. Don’t re-implement something people already have. Do something the community needs. Find out what people are looking for.

We are stronger together

OpenMarch is both the most reward endeavor I have ever taken and the most draining pastime I could have possibly chosen. I have spent countless late nights, listening to ambient Skyrim music and drinking boba tea, trying to drill out the most obscene bugs. Developing a multi-platform desktop app, running a small merch company, crafting a social media presence, and continually helping the user community is a lot for one person with a full-time job to take. But verily luckily, I haven’t had to. The team of volunteers that runs OpenMarch is the life-blood of the project. Everyone is eager to work on the next thing to give the marching world the best product it can get.

The most inspiring part about this project has been seeing dozens of people rushing to my aid to push this project forward. Some give a few hours, some give months, but all of them believe in the mission. There have been a lot of people on the Discord contributing their feedback, fixing bugs, and pushing new features. Hearing the opinions of some very senior developers and drill writers has been invaluable to this project and my own personal growth as a developer and product manager.

OpenMarch’s crown jewel is its dedicated community. The world of the marching arts is a close one, and the less walls there are to providing students with a quality show to perform, the better. By being open source and proudly copyleft, we invite the world to share their expertise with OpenMarch to make a better product for everyone. When someone in the community contributes an idea or fixes a bug, that code is now free for another community member to iterate on and learn from.

I’m forever grateful to the people the help this project run. Without them, none of this would be possible :)

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