It’s been almost a month since I’ve written an update. Things have been busy! If I don’t write these on Monday morning, they mostly don’t get written.
Here are a few things I’ve been up to.
Building real-time, multi-user apps
I’ve been working with the Croquet team for the past two months. Croquet is a library and platform for building multiplayer web applications with no server. What Firebase did for databases, Croquet does for multiplayer. I believe that in the future, most applications will feature real-time collaboration and Croquet is a great solution to quickly build those applications. For example, here’s a collaborative todo list that I built on Croquet. The app is less than 150 lines of JavaScript (according to cloc) plus a bit of HTML and CSS. Take a look; it’s quite readable.
In the process of building demos with Croquet, I’ve starting to get a feeling for the shape of real-time collaborative applications generally. I’m working on an article that lays out the generic set of “concerns” that have to be addressed in order to make an application real-time collaborative. I’ve posted a rough draft of the article titled Concerns of Real-time Collaborative Applications to my site while I flesh it out. Check it out if you’re curious about the architecture of a real-time application.
I’ve also heightened my awareness of how miserable our current user interfaces are when it comes to collaborating in real time. I’ve written a brief draft describing the interface problem called Collaborating with the Invisible. (As an aside, I haven’t figured out a publishing workflow for drafts. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them).
Finally, I’ve started down the rabbit hole of truly understanding what CRDTs do, what kinds of problems they solve, how they fit with Croquet, and so forth. Much to learn here still.
Exploring the metaverse
What is this metaverse and web3 thing that everyone is so excited about?
I’m most interested in:
- new business models that are enabled by a different flow of capital
- new protocols and technological layers that allow for new kinds of computing experiences.
Thinking about thinking tools and building prototypes
From where I sit, it seems the pace of experimentation in tools for thought is accelerating!
Here’s a bunch of things I find interesting:
- I attended the LIVE 2021 workshop, exploring new user interfaces that improve the experience of programming. There were some really interesting talks and papers, but most interesting to me was Clemens Klokmose’s Webstrates.
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Chris Granger, creator of EVE and LightTable, is working on a “fully decentralized, local-first, multiplayer, end-to-end encrypted Notion/Roam that is also completely reprogrammable”.
Let’s say you’ve built a fully decentralized, local-first, multiplayer, end-to-end encrypted Notion/Roam that is also completely reprogrammable (you can change/add anything). How would you build a business around it? For the web3 folks, how could tokens play a part?
— Chris Granger (@ibdknox) November 9, 2021 -
Gordon Brander’s Subconscious is approaching an alpha release.
- Linus Lee is building a new language and environment called Oak, and you can follow along with his thinking in this “devblog”.
- In September, Weiwei of Sprout.place came to talk about pace layering for thinking, and the need for tools that support thinking at different rates, such as for quick tasks, medium projects, and long-term ideas. Alan Chan also showed off Project Meta, a visual playground for notes! Check out the video if you want to see more.
- In October, Rosano demonstrated his home-grown publishing and productivity tools. I found it particularly interesting that he organized all his tools around queues. He has a queue of music to listen to, papers to read, movies to watch, notes he is taking, and demoed a general purpose interface that allows sorting and organizing all his queues. Pretty impressive! Check out the video:
If you’d like to hear about future events like this, you can join the mailing list at ToolsForThought.Rocks. We have a fun event lined up for the end of November!