A Few Research Updates
Today's update will be a quick one. I'm at the beach with my family, and I'm writing before anyone wakes up. But I wanted to update you on a few fun things from this week.
A New Research Notebook
I'm happy to share my new Research Notebook. I finally got around to upgrading the presentation of my research notes. The presentation mimics Andy Matuschak's excellent lab notes, powered by a Gatsby theme called Digital Garden. Setup was incredibly simple. It took me less than two hours to export my notes from Bear, set up the new Gatsby site, and publish to Netlify. The update workflow is also quite a bit easier, so I plan to integrate more of my 1000+ notes over the next few weeks.
If you're wondering where to start reading, I'm particularly happy with the following notes:
There are lots of "quality of life" improvements to come and little bugs to fix, but it's already much more effective for me to browse my own notes using this site than it is within Bear. Win!
I'd love any and all feedback!
A New Research Group
Last year, I worked with Croquet for a few months. Getting to work alongside a group of smart folks exploring new technologies was really invigorating. This week, I joined the team at Fission. Fission is exploring some really interesting "frontier technology." I'm still getting my head around it, but as a teaser, they are basically building a new Internet by re-architecting some of the core primitives: authorization, storage, compute, "apps". It's a wildly ambitious yet delightfully sane project at the same time.
So what will I be doing? That's part of what I'm trying to figure out. There's no shortage of interesting work for me to do. The meta question I'm asking is what role do I play on a team that is pursuing industrial research?
I'll have much more to say about what they're doing, how they're doing it, who they are, and, importantly, why it matters, in the weeks to come.
If you can't stand to wait a week for me to write about Fission's grand vision, go check out this talk by Brooklyn Zalenka.
Glimpses of the Future
I talk about Gordon Brander and Subconscious a lot. Next week, Gordon is speaking at the Tools for Thought Rocks! March meetup on Wednesday, March 30 at 9am PT so if you'd like to hear more about what he's working on, register for the event. Gordon explores an interesting angle: how can we generate creativity, not just capture it? Most tools focus on capture and recall; Subconscious actually sparks creativity.
Wardley Mapping. Where have you been all my life? I considered diving in in a few years ago, but hadn't gotten around to it. Don't be like me and put it off. This 40-minute overview video of Wardley Mapping is a fantastic condensed primer, and well-worth your time.