Collective digest — 2023
2023 is drawing to a close, so it’s time for our annual round-up of collective activities for the past year!
Discourse
Our new Discourse-based forum launched this year and has been quite successful so far! If you enjoy long form / forum-style communication, please check it out if you have not already.
Here are some of the topics we discussed:
- Collaborative work on malleable software
- A World Without Apps
- Joyful Creation
- Window management
- Smooth Gradients of Composability, or Old Man Yells At Compilers
- Freewheeling apps
- understandability => malleability
- Tangible Functional Programming
- SUSN: Simple Uniform Semantic Notation
- An interesting quote about the origin of MVC and event handling
- Tiddlywiki
- Thoughts on WebAssembly / Component Model / WASI?
- Empowering users by inverting three key relationships
- What Lies in the Path of the Revolution
- Götz Bachmann’s Ethnographic Research on Dynamicland
- Fengari
- Beyond Web 2.0 and the Browser?
- UXN and Varvara
- Mu: designing a safe computing stack from the ground up
- The future of software, the end of apps, and why UX designers should care about type theory
Catalog
We have also revamped our catalog process this year. Catalog entries are now sourced from editable wiki-style posts on the forum, which makes contribution simpler and more approachable.
Matrix
Our Matrix room has continued to be quite active as well.
Here’s a summary of interesting conversation topics from our room this year:
- GUI toolkits, Varv
- Gilad Bracha’s digital serfdom post, plugins, dynamic systems
- Josh Justice’s Riverbed with columns of cards
- Programming by example / demonstration
- Starting from scratch vs. transition over time
- Live / interactive programming
- Durable execution, program state as database
- Describing value to general audience
- Hazel’s livelits
- META II compiler playground
- Structural / projectional editors, Uxntal
- Nix, Guix
- Kartik Agaram’s graph drawing tool, pipes, nodes and wires
- Parallelism, lock-free data structures
- Interaction nets
- Situated vs. commodity software
- Minimalist, maximalist
- Procrustean software
- Tailorability
- Vernacular developer
- Social media, interface customisation, format conversion
- Mirrorverse
- App free computing, fediverse
- WebAssembly, WASI, component model
- Konrad Hinsen’s home-grown Mastodon client
- Beaker, Servo, Ladybird, alternative browsers
- Pad++, Dynapad, zooming UIs
- Alexander Obenauer, Mercury OS
- Factor, Forth, stack-based languages
- 9P protocol
- Automerge, CRDTs
- Moderation
- Orion Reed’s objects as reference
- tldraw, LLM hype overload
- Multiplayer canvas with computation
- Collaborative multi-format publishing
- Konrad Hinsen’s software sustainability essay
Looking ahead
Our community has thus far been focused around the occasional trading of ideas, sharing articles and projects, etc. I think it could be interesting to organise our efforts a tad more directly while still allowing for many approaches to arise. To that end, I’ve been thinking about posing one or more “challenge problems” next year where anyone who is interested would submit their approach (perhaps with a deadline for motivation).
Does that sound interesting to you? Either way, please do let me know!