Future of Coding - Research Recap Nine: Constructing My Crusade

Episode Date: December 4, 2017

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.htmlSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, and welcome to the Future of Coding. This is Steve Krauss. So, as you may have noticed, I have been off the horse for the past month or so. I have not been nearly as regular as I was for the first four months of this podcast, and for that I apologize. This was mostly due to the fact that I was sick for like a month with what eventually was diagnosed with strep throat. And then I got antibiotics for that. And I think I'm, I'm better, not a hundred percent, but I think I'm better. So, so I'm back at it now. I also took off an entire week for Thanksgiving, which was really wonderful being home in Florida with my family and my girlfriend and then I flew back last week and I came to my journal after this month-long

vacation and started prioritizing and sculpting my calendar a new phrase that I really like and it really made for a very productive week last week. I was really focused and I was working on the most important things and I could feel the results. My head was buzzing with ideas all throughout the week. For those of you who are curious about how my plan for this project has been developing, I created, I deleted version 3 and started a brand new version 4. So let's see, in this version I started keeping a tab of all the prior versions. So you can see that as it grows at futureofcoding.org slash plan.

You could see that. You could also see I added a table of contents to the plan, so that'll help too. So in version four, I articulated my mission for this project as, quote, empowering creative expression through programming. I also wrote a list of design principles and then refracted them out into their own page, futureofcoding.org slash principles. The central question of version four of my plan is whether or not I should be someone who builds

by starting companies or nonprofits or just does research, more like Brad Victor or Michael Lewis, more of a writer. I also made it clear in this plan that I want to make sure to wrap up my efforts at the coding space and wolf.js which means maybe writing essays about them like an essay about learning to code, sharing videos about those sorts of things, and handing WoofJS off to a new maintainer. Okay, so that was version 4 of the plan. Then I came back to finish it because I just it wasn't quite done and I thought it was the worst and so I realized I would need to you know create version five

before I did that I found this course called future authoring that the philosopher psychologist Jordan Peterson created so I spent a few hours doing that which was mostly repetitive given that I spent so much time already journaling and reflecting however However, I did have an interesting insight, which helped me process what I'm passionate about in this project, which would help me come up with my mission here. So the first point is that humans are apes plus tools, where tools include ideas, patterns of thought, software, physical tools, etc. Two, tools are the way that humans design the next version of humanity. Because the tools shape who we are. People think that humans are going to drastically change when we have chips in our brains, but humans are already bionic because we incorporate our mental tools into our brains,

and even our external tools, we really incorporate them into ourselves, and they make us more powerful. So point number three is that we really need to be able to take our tools with us everywhere, because if we don't, if we can't, then we become diminished in certain contexts. For example, it's hard for me to take certain tools into a dinner table conversation, or really any conversation or collaboration with others. I think part of why I personally like to work alone so much is because I am most augmented when working alone at my computer.

Collaboratively working with others or in a conversation, I have to leave my computer or phone world to enter into a conversation. And then if we ever need a phone or computer, I have to kind of leave the conversation and go into a virtual world and then come back out with the answer. Sure, whiteboarding is a way to get around that, or even a Google Doc. But on the whole, I think this is a big problem. And since I did that exercise, I actually came up with a fourth principle, that empowering humans to rapidly create their own tools to solve their own problems and to

think with could be an entire game changer. I think that's what the printing press did in some ways by spreading literacy so people could think their own ideas more explicitly, kind of how I use my journal to think ideas more explicitly, and to read the ideas of others and incorporate them into themselves. So currently, if you have a problem, it's so expensive to create an app

that you have to solve it for so many people for it to be justified, for you to be justified in creating that app. But what if everyone was able to solve their own problems so quickly that they could just solve them for themselves? They didn't have to create a whole app. They could just create for themselves. What would it look like for Uber

to have been created by regular people in a decentralized way as a car sharing thing you know more more of the ethos of lyft but you know never raising vc funding it was just you know decentralized protocol almost like http okay but that's kind of a wackier idea all right so version five of my plan is framed around the idea of crusades or living for a cause. This comes from re-watching Inventing Our Principle by Brett Victor. I didn't realize, because I haven't watched this video in years, how clearly he articulates the way I want to live my life." Basically, he makes this analogy that in the social world, people

can live for a cause. For example, Elizabeth Stanton lived for making women suffer to think. Why don't technologists have causes? And then he talks about how Larry Tesla had the no modes cause, and how Brett himself has the immediate connection. Creators need an immediate connection to what they create cause. And I started thinking about what's Elon Musk's cause and I think his cause is averting existential disasters through the for-profit sector. For a little while I had trouble coming up with Alan Kay's cause, but I think it's democratizing tool creation in the same vein that I care about tool creation. Steve Jobs similarly was creating the bicycle for the mind.

And so I think I need to spend a lot of time constructing my cause. You know, it's not going to be the easiest thing in the world to just figure it out. It's not out there for me to find or in my head for me to articulate. I have to construct it. It's a, it's going to take, you know, maybe a few months for me to come up with it. And in order to do that, I'm going to need to, I think, really read my main influences, you know, most notably Brett Victor and some of his influences. So much like I did my Alan K. deep dive a number of weeks ago, I'm going to spend the next two weeks mostly doing my Brett Victor deep dive and reflection. I got started with that this past week by reading

and beginning to reread the Dynamic Lion design, which blew my brain wide open. I'm so impressed by it and inspired by it. And I wrote almost 4,000 words in reflection on it and I'm not even done reviewing it. So I'll probably start there or so and also go back and rewatch a lot of videos and essays and maybe even read some of the things I haven't gotten to yet. The last time I did a Brett Victor deep dive, I started at the first blog post he ever wrote. I think when he was like 23 or 24. And that was probably going too far back. Because I think I have to prioritize a little bit better than that.

So anyways, before I get started with any of this, I'm going to prioritize the links I need to read from him. As you'll hear later, I reserved 30 hours over the next two weeks to do the Brett Victor Deep Dive. And then also, I'm planning a trip out to California to visit Dynamic Land, which I'm really excited about. So I got designs, and I read them, I tweeted about them, and chatted with the Dynamic Land team over Twitter and email, and I think I'm going to visit for at least a few days, maybe a week or so. That'll be real exciting. Maybe I'll even get to visit Protocol Labs. I'll have to email that.

Alright, last month I also began mind mapping the essay about essays that I potentially could work on with Nikki Case. I did it on paper, but I still got some good stuff there. Then the next day I began mind mapping my essay about learning to code, which is highly related to the essay about essays because an essay is instructional. You have to understand how brains work and how learning works. And instead of doing this on paper, I did this on this tool called Coggle, a mind mapping tool that I really liked. I think Prezi also works, but this one I think is a little bit more niche. It's made for mind mapping. And it's beautiful. You can see that in the link for this episode. In the past, I discussed working on this project called Unbreakable Links,

which would allow me to rapidly move around content on my website, but without breaking any past links. It was a whole complicated scheme. I thought it would just take me a few hours to build it. Turns out I was drastically wrong. I've already spent maybe a dozen hours on it and it's nowhere near to even being close. So I'm putting that on the back burner and just going to use band aid solutions for the foreseeable future. In addition to the Brett Victor deep dive, I've been reading some more influences of my influences, including John Dewey, who's really brilliant and articulate, Jean Piaget, who is, you know,

Seymour Papert's influence, and Seymour Papert is a huge influence of mine and my influences. And then, you know, this one might surprise some of you. I'm reading the writings of F.M. Alexander. So F.M. Alexander created this technique called the Alexander Technique, which is kind of like a postural technique, or it's kind of like, yeah, it's postural or stretching. And I got into it from my friend Jonathan Lung to help me with my back, because I've had back pain and even my hands I've had a lot of hand pain for years as many of you know and it's been transformative it's really been the best thing ever I've tried you know in the past I tried physical therapy

chiropractor you know medical doctors all the different modalities, and very stretching techniques, and nothing really was that great. And this, in just a short amount of months, has really gotten rid of most of my pain. But more importantly, and where it relates here, is that the philosophy behind this technique is really beautiful and jives with my whole worldview. And part of the reason is because F.M. Alexander was a collaborator and contemporary with John Dewey. They worked together, they wrote forwards to each other's books, and their ideas really relate in a lot of ways which is kind of crazy and and deep and subtle in ways that I know exist but I'm having trouble even articulating to myself so I'm gonna have to get back to you on that one

another book that's really blowing my brain is how to measure anything the basic thesis is that any quality that you would care about can be measured because if you care about it, it can be somehow detected. And if it can be detected, just list how it's detected. And that's basically how it's measured. Measurements aren't nearly this precise thing that you may think of, or this formal thing you may think of. All measurement formal thing you may think of. All measurement has uncertainty. The definition of measurement is a quantifiable decrease in the amount of uncertainty you

have about a quantity. So it's not about certainty, it's about decreasing uncertainty. And this is relevant and profound for two reasons. One, I'm studying the philosophy of science in relation to this project, and measurement is key here. Science is really the study of measurement, which is really profound. I've only just begun to unpack that idea. And secondly, even more, it's relevant for me here

because as I come up with my goal for this project, I'll need to know how to measure it. So I'll be able to check on my progress and see when I can be done with this project. If I... potentially I'll want to construct my crusade in such a way that I'll never be done with it. Although that might not be exactly what I want. For example, if your crusade was women's suffrage, after the 20th Amendment theory, you could be done. But maybe not, because you could say that there are other women's issues to work on, or even suffrage. There are more angles to it than just the legality of it, such as women's independence or employment

rights, etc. Alrighty, well, now let's talk about the next two weeks. So my priorities are to do a custom page for the this the my daily log for this journal so here's the the story when i started this project i would start every morning by going into futureofcoding.org journal and writing my stream of consciousness notes about what i'm working on and what i'm going to work on and what I'm Thinking about and it was really great for so many reasons However, the one drawback was that

So much of my content and my thinking was in this journal style. So my thinking was very time series structured my thoughts were organized in the order that they were thought, not around the content that I was thinking about. And that seemed like a really big problem and a real limiting, really limiting for me, both in the way that I think and in the way that others would be able to peruse my thoughts. So I decided that a better system would be to fully deprecate the journal. So I no longer write in futureofcoding.org slash journal.

Whenever I have thoughts, I put them in various files within various folders directly on futureofcoding.org. So if I want to take a note on the dynamiclandzine, that's futureofcoding.org slash notes slash dynamiclandzine dot markdown dot md. So this way, when I write about things, they're directly in the files and folders that are relevant. However, I still want sometimes to have meta thoughts or even just thoughts about what I wrote or what I'm going to work on next or just random anxieties that I want to process through or think through. So where did those thoughts go? And then it hit me. That's what a commit message is. It's kind of like, you know, there's the work, and then there's the note about the work. There's the meta content. And so I've begun doing that.

So you'll see my commit messages now are very long, and they're in Markdown. So if you go now to futureofcoding.org slash log, I stole the name from Git log, where you could see all the Git commit messages, that'll just redirect you to futureofcoding.org's commits page on GitHub. And so you can technically read all my notes.

However, there are a few drawbacks, including that I don't render the markdown as markdown. It's just raw. And it's just generally really clunky and difficult. And I can't link to things. It's really untenable. And part of why this worries me is that I used to have a lot of followers of this podcast and journal reach out to me via email asking for advice or help or offering feedback and that's almost all but dried up recently and I wonder it could be because I haven't podcast recently that's a likely cause but I think the another cause could be that people like following my journal and now that my journal is dead and this new log is harder to read,

people are having trouble interfacing with my thoughts. So that is a high priority for me this week. But I don't think it will take that long, just somewhere around five hours. It's going to be a post-commit hook locally. What that'll do is update a piece of data, static data, in the directory and then I'll have a Jekyll template that'll render the commit messages. So it'll kind of all happen statically and locally and I'll leverage GitHub pages Jekyll stuff. So it shouldn't be too hard at all. And then I have various inbox tasks. I don't need to really go into them.

But I set aside 10, 10 hours over the next two weeks to do my inbox. And to be clear, when I say inbox, it's not just emails. It's like all my to-dos I put in my inbox. I use Google inbox. I really, I really love it to manage my my life and and yeah so I I went ahead and calendar sculpted the next two weeks you can go uh see the link for this episode I have my calendar public took pictures of it and anyone can see what's going on you can even see who I'm having dinner with etc etc and yeah yeah it's a lot of Brett Victor deep dive I also have time for for working out emails a few cool conversations with with people like Jamie Brandon and Stefan and the future programming meeting is actually tonight

I don't think many people are going to come. I think it's just one or two confirmed people. But I'm happy to go and hang out and do my own work if nobody shows. And I'm happy to chat with one person if one person shows or more. And that's that. Have a great two weeks and I will talk to you all on monday the 18th which will be the last episode of the year