My time, Looted
Oh my! I've missed sending out my weekly update the last two weeks. And I've genuinely missed it! Writing this update each week has become an important rhythm for making sense of my thoughts, priorities, and a reflection on what I've learned in the last week.
My time, Looted
These past two weeks have been dominated by two things: Croquet and Loot.
As I wrote three weeks ago, I've started working with the Croquet team to help them drive adoption of their innovative collaboration framework. The Croquet library is simple to use and handles a lot of the headache of writing collaborative applications. In a few dozen lines of code, I was able to set up a collaborative web app. Pretty neat! But going beyond a simple app has helped me realize that writing multi-user applications requires different mental models than building single-user applications. My brain has been working hard to process these shifts.
And speaking of mental model shifts, on August 27th, an innocuous tweet linking to a smart contract propelled me down an NFT rabbit hole into the Loot multiverse. In the past few weeks, I've learned a ton about smart contract composability, tokens, DAOs, and community formation. As I often say, the best way to learn is by doing, and I dove headfirst into Loot, spending hours each day trying out new contracts, cruising Discords, and writing my own impressions. I've been collecting my thoughts on this experience and plan to publish something this week. If you haven't yet heard of Loot, this discussion is a pretty good starting point for the history and why it might be a very big deal.
Glimpses of the future
Tools for Thought Interchange: September Event is happening next Tuesday, September 28 @ 5pm PT. Weiwei Hsu will talk about pace layering for thinking together: communicating and collaborating on a project often occurs at several layers of speed. How might tools and routines of different kinds support us in thinking together better? We have a spot for one more speaker: if you're interested, reach out for more details.
Why this matters?
Working with others is something that occurs on a spectrum from fully asynchronous to fully synchronous. These different modes of work tend to have very different workflows and different tools. Just think about Slack versus RFCs. When these tools can't interoperate with one another, we end up with a disjointed collaboration experience. We need to think carefully about collaboration and how our tools might support custom workflows appropriate to the different "pace layers."
Project Meta lets you lay out notes on an infinite canvas. It's a brand new project, but the early visuals are quite compelling. I started on a similar project a few weeks ago, and this looks very much like what I had in mind! I'm going to be trying it out in the next few weeks and I'll share my experience.
Why this matters?
I believe there is a huge opportunity at the intersection of text and spatial canvases. I’m not suggesting one tool should rule them all. Rather, we need to explore how to use tools together, seamlessly, with each doing what it does best.