Feeling of Computing

How do we maintain millions of lines of code? For example, the Social Security Administration has 60-million-lines of COBOL. James Koppel is building tools to help tame these kinds of beasts. His current work is on decreasing the costs to build developer tools by allowing the same tool to work on a variety of languages. James Koppel is a Carnegie Mellon CS grad, Thiel Fellow, entrepreneur, educato...

My research recap episodes are back! This is the first I've recorded since the end of 2017. I discuss my new mentor-mentee relationship with Jonathan Edwards, my upcoming new paper on functional reactive programming, my move to London, my longer-term goals, and other various musings about abstractions, monads, and data ninja playgrounds. futureofcoding.org/reflections/13 Support us on Patreon: htt...

Many of you have heard about Dynamicland, Bret Victor's new project. Omar Rizwan comes on the podcast this week to tell us all about it. He recently wrote an amazing write up about it, [Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit](https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/), that I'd highly reccomend to everyone interested in the future of computing. futureofcoding.org/episodes/28 Support us on Pa...

David K Piano is bringing explicit software modeling to the web with his xstate library. He gives talks around the world about statecharts, and is cooking up a new SaaS service that will help developers model and understand their application using statecharts. In this conversation, David and I discuss the benefits of declarative languages, such as CSS, the principle of least power,  musical n...

Glen Chiacchieri has worked at the MIT Media Lab on Scratch, at Dynamicland with Bret Victor, and is now becoming a psychotherapist. He's known for his Legible Mathematics essay, his Flowsheets programming prototypes, and the Laser Socks game, among many other projects. In this conversation, we discuss: how he grounds his research in compassion, the tradeoffs between working on the "model vs UI" o...

Kevin Lynagh is a designer specializing in user interfaces for complex systems. He co-created Subform, a CAD-inspired UI design tool, with Ryan Lucas, which got a thousand backers on Kickstarter. He recently created Sketch.systems, an interactive playground for designing system behavior using Statecharts (hierarchical state machines). In this conversation, we discuss direct manipulation, Statechar...

Do you hate Makefiles and YAML config files? Do you feel your soul slowly dying as you wait for your tests to run? Do you yearn for even-more-continuous integration? Nick Santos, the CTO and founder of Windmill Engineering, is here to help. Windmill's a cloud-based build-system that intelligently runs your relevant tests in the cloud, in parallel on every file save. How's that for a tight feedback...

Brent Yorgey is a professor of math and CS at Hendrix College. He studys functional programming in Haskell, type systems, and category theory, and more. He is the creator of the  diagrams  vector graphics Haskell library. He taught  Introduction to Haskell  and  The Art of Recursion  at the University of Pennslyvaia (which were my two favorite classes in college!). In...

Philip Guo researches ways to scale programming education beyond the classroom. He is the creator of Python Tutor ( http://pythontutor.com/ ), a widely-used code visualization and collaborative learning platform, and an assistant professor at UC San Diego. In this episode, we discuss why diverse groups of people study CS, his various prototypes, and the differences between technological research a...

My guest this week, Aidan Cuniffee, is the founder of two startups in this space, first Dropsource and now Optic. Aidan and I discuss the trade-offs between creating tools for developers vs non-programmers. We also get to hear some of the upcomming features to expect from Optic. We finish off the interview with a fun theoretical discussion of notation, representation, conciseness and learnability....

Jason Brennan is a Canadian computer scientist focused on education and computing. He’s worked at Hopscotch and Khan Academy. We discussed his experiences building multiple programming language platforms, the incomprehensibly large vision of Alan Kay, and his new project Beach. http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/20 Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing See omnystu...

Like many of us, Joe Cohen fell in love with HyperCard. Three years ago, he founded  Universe to re-imagine HyperCard for the modern day. In this interview, Joe walks us through his initial vision for Universe, and the pivots along the way. It's a refreshing story about balancing pie-in-the-sky vision with shorter-term customer needs.  You can find the demo videos that Joe references her...

Excited to be back after sickness and vacation!  The notes for this episode can be found here:  http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/18-research-recap-nine.html Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Many of you may have never heard of Bubble.is. That's because they don't build for developers. They build for business people who need to create technology but can't afford to work with developers. Over the past four years, Emmanual and his cofounder Josh have bootstrapped their drag-and-drop website builder into a profitable business. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomput...

Back in action after my two-week, sore-throat-induced hiatus, I reflect on my work over the past weeks on my Life Plan and Work Plan. If you make it to the end of this episode, you’ll also get some off-the-cuff tips for ergonomic workstation design. You can view the notes for this episode here: futureofcoding.org/episodes/16-research-recap-eight-life-and-work-planning.html Support us on...

Scott Mueler is the founder of UCode, an after school coding program in California, which he created after teaching his then six-year-old son Ken to code. Scott tells us about how he developed his parenting/teaching/curricular philosophy, and how all educators and parents can apply these principles to raise geniueses of their own. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing S...

Inspired by Juan Benet (and Elon Musk), I zoomed out last week and thought about my "master plan" for this project. You can see a detailed outline for this episode with links here: http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/14-research-recap-six-master-planning.html Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most people consider ML-based langauges like Elm hard enough to learn as an adult. But according to Professor Christopher Anand of McMaster University, they work really well to introduce Computer Science to children, starting in 4th grade! In this episode, Christopher and I explore the difference between alegbraic thinking and computational (or sequential) thinking, and why this is incredibly rele...

The last two weeks were all about CycleJS. In order to create visual spreadsheet metaphors for CycleJS stream combinators, I need to have a better understanding of how CycleJS works, and so I played around with it by building a CycleJS Flappy bird. I also spend time recently playing with spreadsheets and Clay.  You can read more at my journal  ( futureofcoding.org/journal ). Support us o...

One of the original ReactJS developers at Facebook and Instagram, Pete Hunt ( @ floydophone ) tells us the story behind the metoric rise of ReactJS. Pete explains the problems he faced Instagram Web that led him to Jordan Walke's early React prototype, and how he helped develop, evangalize, and grow React to what you know it to be today. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomp...

In this episode I speak with Paul Chiusano ( @pchiusano ), creator of Unison , about his ambitious vision for the future, where we can abstract over distributed computing, and there are no apps. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The last two-week-research-cycle was my most productive yet! In this recap, I debreif my Alan Kay deep dive, discuss tweaking my schedule after reading Peak, review conversations with Jaime Brandon and Dan Scanlon, read aloud my thoughts on proper computer use patterns and my prototype idea LogicHub, recap my early morning meeting with CycleJS creator Andre Staltz, and discuss the next steps for m...

After coming back from Boston, I did a deep dive into Jonathan Edwards, Jaime Brandon, Conal Elliot, as well as spending a full day reviewing Eve (Chris Granger). Towards the end of the week, I released a simple prototype for StreamSheets and send it over to Andre Staltz for ideas and feedback. Notes here:  http://futureofcoding.org/journal#research-recap-4 Support us on Patreon: https://www....

In this episode, I speak with Lloyd Tabb, co-founder and CTO of Looker , a data analytics platform build around a SQL modeling langauge, LookML. He talks about how he created a successful business around a language, and how he continually improves the language through deprecation. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over the last two weeks I had a suprise trip to Boston to meet with other researchers in this space. In preperation for the event, I spent most of the last two weeks building the WoofJS Workflow prototype. Notes here:  http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/6-research-recap-three.html Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informa...