Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
Colin McDonnellRecommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 months, 2015–2024
talk · general · evergreen · 2015–2024 on HN
Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of tho…
HN commenters cite it as the best demonstration of why instant feedback matters in programming tools.
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5 comments from Hacker News
I absolutely care about things that take hundreds of milliseconds for my builds. The faster I can build, the faster I can iteratively try new things things out. The goal should be to be able to see changes instantly after you make them, and Tailwind is usually just 1 part of a build pipeline. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is probably the best demonstration of why this matters; in the first 10 minutes he shows a very concrete example of an insight that would not have occurred without instant feedback ▶ this video
Bret Victor's talks are a counter example to this. His live programming in this[1] talk is nothing short of mind blowing. [1] ▶ this video
A lot of the thought process here seems to move into Bret Victor's talk on 'Inventing on Principle'[0] [0] ▶ this video
That landing page looks right out of Bret Victor's time travel demos ( ▶ this video , or link ). Communicates the value instantly. Incredibly well done! IMO the most time consuming issue in triaging bug reports is reproducing them. Replay definitively solves the "can't repro this" problem.
Dan Abramov 2015 link But there was one earlier presentation I cannot find it, guy was showing live debugging of the video game. Not sure is it TED or one of conferences ... Edit: This is it: Bred Victor: ▶ this video 2013 Future of programming link