Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

Nice! Playing around with the widget under the section "Experimenting with lines" I'm reminded of Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk [0] (an absolute must watch, if anyone hasn't yet). In particular, changing the smoothness reveals a sort of scaling effect that I'd probably never know about if not playing around with sliders and having it update in real time rather than setting individual values. Very interesting and beautiful! [0] ▶ this video

Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is even better (albeit it isn't only a product pitch): ▶ this video

I think most here have already seen it, but I find that Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk[1] is one of the best I've seen. I re-watch it every so often to help prevent my thinking from falling into a rut. When developing software as a career, it's so easy to just fall into a pattern where you use the same tools and techniques over and over again. Watching this talk this talk inspires me to investigate alternate approaches to developing and delivering software. It's easy to think of software development as something that always need to involve code, and nothing but code. But watching this talk inspires me to go and try things like Node Red and Unreal Blueprints. In both cases, code is usually still involved, but they both offer a visual way of connecting components. I find it helpful to be able to visualize software this way so I can immediate understand how data flows through the application. [1] ▶ this video

Probably not exactly what you need, but as far as inspiration is concerned, it doesn't get much better than this: ▶ this video Check out Bret Victor's talks in general (worrydream.com). He is quite interesting.

Is this related to Bret Victor's stuff? My mind was blown when I saw this video 2 years ago, and I can't help but see similarities here: ▶ this video

Great to see. More generally: I feel like playgrounds are grossly underused in our industry. It's possible the issue is in the name -- it immediately connotes that whatever you're doing isn't real work, it's just a place to, well, "play". But really these kind of playgrounds are at least a cousin, if not a direct descendant, of the immediate feedback principle that underlies everything from a REPL to the kind of systems (Symbolics, etc) that allow you to edit running code. Their potential is beautifully illustrated in Brett Victor's famous 'Inventing on Principle' talk: ▶ this video Three areas that I'd love to see playgrounds mature beyond teaching beginners CSS: 1) Integrated directly into developer documentation. You can see some of that in systems that are documenting services -- for example, the Google Sheets API documentation has a 'Try this Method' box that lets you post a request to the service on the same page that describes it, but what I really want is something like that when I'm reading the man page of a destructive disk command, or a complex database query, or a low-level C graphics library. That'll require a playground wired to something as big as a VM, maybe. 2) Integrated into textbooks: for the last couple years the astonishing posts from Bartosz Ciechanowski ([Sound]( link ), [Bicyle]( link )) have demonstrated just how much better a textbook could be if you could interactively play with the concepts you're reading about. Unlike dev docs, the thing you're in

Time and Time and Space and Space are necessary for high quality creativity : link and working with solid principles, from first principles, is how you reach durable new understandings. IMO. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has some great material about the use of principles in being personally creative. Inventing on Principle: ▶ this video I serve as a creativity coach to builders, innovators, and founders. Sometimes what a thinker needs more than anything else is a BREAK to BATHE! and then... EUREKA! link

In terms of mind-expanding or intellectually stimulating, I find it's easier to get that from Youtube. I recommend: 3blue1brown for math ( link ) Everyday Astronaut if you are casually interested in rockets ( link ) Bret Victor ( ▶ this video ) or Rich Hickey ( link ) for programming and design. Doing a full college course is such a time investment and it usually takes a few weeks to start proving the interesting stuff. I find it more fun to look to shorter content for inspiration. I might realize I don't understand the fundamentals of the topic and then seek out a way to study it.

Bringing two concepts closer, especially visually will result in a better developer experience - Thus merging html and js into a single file, component, class / object and sequential logic was really the turning point to build more complex web apps. This reminds me of the excellent talk by bret victor ▶ this video

You’d probably like Bret Victor’s inventing on principle talk: ▶ this video He demonstrates some good examples. I’m not quite sure it’s what you mean by visual, but it seems obviously valuable and tools that enabled some of what he shows would be really useful. I’m not sure why we don’t have these things - I think Alan Kay would say it’s because we stopped doing real research to improve what our tools can be. We’re just relying on old paradigms (I just watched this earlier today: link )

Nice, but I think I can raise you. That talk mostly seemed pretty predictable (though I incorrectly guessed gfx via sixels[0], not a(nother) terminal emulator). If your interest was piqued with that parent video though, prepare to have your mind blown with this[1], who’s thesis maybe similar in the sense of “stop _just_ simply working”. Bernhardt seems to be saying don’t be afraid to take time and think deeply and “go deep”, while Victor is explicitly saying make it count by way of targeting with intention what’s important to you. A sort of “fight the good fight.” [0] link [1] ▶ this video

You may not consider him a genius. But Bret does have some pretty innovate ideas on Programming and Design (and more). Good examples: Inventing on Principle: ▶ this video The Humane Representation of Thought: link