Hey nameless Knitters! That is if I bcc this time…
Show stuff
You know when you’ve got a deadline and until the last ten minutes you’re still getting your screen recording software to work? What can I say, life is better on the edge.
Today was demo day! I decided to show Knit to someone new, so I hastily gave Knit clean pants and a haircut. There were two notable features added to the prototype.
One was being able to share the results of a data flow invocation between two computers (kind of like pushing/pulling code with git). In the demo I referred to it as sharing run histories, but I’m not sure if that’s the clearest explanation.
A tougher one was using Knit to manage virtualenvs. This is kind of like treating runtime dependencies as data. This is tricky because virtualenvs are volatile and cannot be shared between computers. Lots of pacing! And [sketches](transistor of volatile data flows.png). I ended up building support with a special junction step that is never cached, and will output either an old or newly generated value depending on whether the virtualenv is up to date.
If you want to check out the demo here’s a recording (10 min). FYI there are some recording hiccups in the last few minutes.
Off-topic stuff (you were warned!)
SvelteKit launched their beta. From the heretic who claimed “React is not reactive.” The devil gives the most seductive presentations though.
Experimental interaction design is like my catnip. Send me swooning with a pencil flip. Teach your browser some old tricks. Stumble on one eyeball tweet and find yourself down a biology visualizations rabbit hole.
Muse is an infinite composable canvas. Anything composable gets my attention, and I like their approach to make the tablet more tactile, instead of tapping toolbars. I tried it out but $100 is kind of bonkers for a technology demo.
Wildcard lets you manipulate web pages like you would spreadsheets. I’ve been doing similar things with Greasemonkey scripts but they’re pretty painful to write.
Sorry (not sorry) for all the randomness. This is what happens when you research Observable’s execution model but end up on the wrong page and click someone’s Twitter link then reactivate your Twitter account. o.O
So, uh, I guess I’m back on Twitter. Ugh my reading list quadrupled.
Be careful what you click.