Welcome
Here you will find information about the people, projects, and positions in the Application Team at the National Museum of Denmark (NatMus).
It’s probably mostly relevant for actual applicants for current openings.
We are currently looking to add three profiles to our team:
- Back-end developer (2021)
Our team
Andreas
He is known for his love for broth, books and complaining about the weather. Between coding sessions he is usually found with a liberal amount of Thinking Putty in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.
He values autonomy, communication, improving craftsmanship and a good work-life balance.
He codes back-end in C# using a mixture of platforms like MSSQL, Elasticsearch, .NET Core, Web API and Azure and is curious about Graph databases and Blazor.
Jacob
He is known for his love for scouting, partly for active outdoors activities and partly all the social stuff you never knew about. In the wild he is easily recognizable in his colourful t-shirts and slippers.
The phrase “Christmas came early” takes on a different meaning with Jacob as Christmas songs are usually played from September and televised advent calenders are made to be re-(*10)-watched indefinitely.
He codes front-end in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but have taken to using TypeScript, Sass, and Vue as his tool set. He values proper semantics and scorns inessential interruptions.
Carsten
Carsten is the SharePoint and Office 365 developer / administrator and has been working at NatMus for 3 years. He has a MSc in Communication and Molecular biology from RUC and has 28 years of experience in the field of communication, web- and SharePoint development/administration. For more professional information, check out his LinkedIn profile.
He is known for his love for chili (the stronger the better (seriously who can eat something called Crazy Hot Reaper Sauce?!?)) and trying to restore the Kalmar Union in Europa Universalis IV.
He values good communication, cake, beer and food.
New UX / UI designer
Not much is known about this person, except that there is a 43% chance that he / she (incorrectly) believes that bacon should be served super-crispy, almost burned if not cremated.
New Front-end developer
Not much is known about this person, except that there is a 0.45% chance that he / she knows enough Twin Peaks to recognize which character from Twin Peaks is quoted above.
New Back-end developer
Not much is known about this person, except that there is a 78% chance that he / she believes coffee should be served black as midnight on a moonless night.
Our projects
Primary objective
We are creating an internal system named “Urd”. As any proper name for an it-system, it is both an acronym and a name. The acronym stands for “Udstilling og Registrering af Data” og the name is a “skæbnegudinde” in the norse mythology.
The main purpose of Urd is to consolidate all the old systems with their data and workflows in a single coherent system. Urd must support a variety of different scenarios, for example:
- Someone finds a large treasure of coins we need to register.*
- We need to preserve a piece of wood in a tub of fluids for 18 years.
- We need to plan an exhibition and find the right items and their location amongst our 2.000.000 items.
- We need to expose our public data so external developers can build applications using our data.
- We need to integrate with other systems so we can enrich our data, for example DIME.
- We need to implement a coin ontology so we add our data to the common European coin data.
- We need an efficient way to store large amounts of image data.
- We need AI to help us tag images and transcribe handwriting.
- And so on…
* Imagine finding a hoard in your basement. This came true in 1883 when the largest hoard of Medieval gold coins found in Denmark was discovered in a basement in Smedegade in Slagelse. Apart from nearly 200 gold coins there was also silver coins, silver ingots, and a lot of jewellery. It must have belonged to the elite of the time, as the contents are spectacular.
Secondary responsibilities
Urd is our priority but we also have a number of side projects. We act as technical advisers on bigger side projects that we don’t have time for now and take a more active role in smaller side projects.
Previous examples of this are:
- A site for inputting and collecting diaries for the entire country. Key challenges were, among others, user-friendliness and performance as one of the target groups was schoolchildren and entire classrooms could upload large files at the same time.
- Setting up the infrastructure for an external site to improve uptime.
- A specific workflow to input coins to accelerate the processing of Danefæ.
- Create a system specifically designed to help the Danish War Museum go through their collection of uniforms.
After the planned projects
There are a number of interesting areas we will focus on after Urd is done, but one of them is focusing our attention on systems whose primary users are the public. This can be in the form of websites, but also systems that are used in the exhibition.
As an example we have a lot of websites that are old and developed with no integration to other systems. The goal is to in-source all external public sites and redo some of them in the progress. Examples of sites we would redo and in-source.
Warning: These are from a time, when the internet was young and inexperienced, before CSS, frame- and tableless layouts, and coherent colour schemes.
The above sites are… old… but they contain large amounts of good data that we would like to preserve. So a project would be to include the data in Urd and either create a new site or integrate the site in our primary collection site Samlinger Online.
Your place in the above
UX / UI design
Urd is going to consist of many workflows and we have begun with the workflows needed for collection management.
Currently the UX is a mixture of workflows taken from existing systems and new ideas, which makes it a bit incoherent. Your job will be to understand the users and the business and create a coherent UX.
The UI of Urd is standard Bootstrap, which works fine, but is also a bit incoherent with the ideas we have added. Your job will be to make a new design for Urd, which could take the form of either a stand-alone open-source NatMus design (an example could Clarity) or a specific design for Urd.
You will be one step ahead of the developers, so while they are busy implementing the UX and UI you have created for the collection management, you will focus on the UX of the next workflows, which is focusing on preservation and location.
Front-end development
As we work to meet and support very specific use cases this is not simply a matter of turning a design into code as pixel perfect as humanly possible.
Bridging the gap between designed workflows and our data API is a craft that requires a high understanding of the needs, practices, and patience of our users.
You should feel comfortable communicating technical ideas and concepts in an accurate and unambiguous manner with co-workers dedicated to different areas of expertise, while both aiding and challenging their current workflows.
As part of achieving this we all participate actively in sparring around both practical everyday challenges as well as more theoretical high-level decisions. We’re building things together and value input and suggestions in technical issues as well as involvement in the over all systems design.
Back-end development
Will be added when the job posting is online.
Our workflow
We are small team with good communication so we try to keep things as simple as possible. We use GitHub for project planning and milestones, which we then split into issues. Once a week we have a meeting where we use our Kanban board to assign issues and plan the next week. The business is also invited to this meeting, so they can see our progress and ask any questions they might have.