Build Software Quickly: Recent Episodes

Mary Rose Cook

The podcast version of Mary's research into building software quickly.

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Omar has worked at Dynamicland and built experimental computing interfaces like Hijack Your Feed and TabFS.  We talked about:

  • Communicating computing design principles through demos, rather than manifestos.
  • Embodying computational objects as things the user already knows how to manipulate, like files, screenshots, or pieces of paper.
  • What it takes to make a computing environment complete enough to live on.
  • Molding a temporary user interface that fits the current task.

Links:

  • Oberon operating system
  • Canon Cat computer
  • Geoffrey Litt
  • Acme text editor
  • GoldenEye - a history
  • Omar's website
  • Omar's GitHub Sponsors page

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David Cole designs the incredible game making app, Castle. Before that, he was VP of Design at Quora. We talked about:

  • The design decisions that make it quick and accessible to build expressive games with Castle.
  • How Castle eschews some goals (like teaching coding or enabling professional quality games) so it can nail its actual goals.
  • The techniques Castle uses to let people use latent time on their phone to create, rather than consume.
  • Why games are valuable as culture. And why it's worthwhile working on a tool to make games.
  • How game design techniques like emergence can be applied to non-game software.

Links:

  • Castle
  • This podcast is part of Mary Rose Cook's research to build software quickly.

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Geoffrey is doing a PhD at MIT on Human Computer Interaction and end user programming. He also does research projects with the independent R&D lab, Ink & Switch. He is working on helping more non-programmers build their own software tools.

We talked about:

  • Potluck, Geoffrey’s latest experimental tool that lets a user start with a meaningful document (like a recipe) and progressively enhance it with computation (like automatically adjusting timings).
  • Trade-offs between concrete use cases, building for others and giving research time to show results.
  • Orienting thoughts around end user programming around the context the user is in, rather than who they are.
  • The ways that different communities help foster research.

Links:

  • Formality considered harmful
  • Geoffrey’s website
  • Geoffrey on Twitter
  • Christopher Alexander
  • This podcast is part of Mary Rose Cook’s research to build software quickly.