New essay: Malleable Software!
Hello! It's been a while. Quick personal update: I'm a dad now! The whole family is a bit sleep-deprived but doing great :)
New essay: Malleable Software
I'm excited to share a new essay that I've written together with my collaborators Josh Horowitz, Peter van Hardenberg, and Todd Matthews at Ink & Switch:
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
It's a manifesto explaining why people need the ability to customize their software tools, why they can't do that today, and how we might bring about a different future. Among other things, we talk about why the "application" model is flawed, and why AI coding holds potential but is not sufficient on its own to usher in a new era of personal software. We also synthesize a bunch of good ideas from prior work such as Hypercard, Smalltalk, and Dynamicland, and share some things we've learned from years of prototyping at Ink & Switch, including projects I've been involved with like Patchwork, Embark, and Potluck.
There's a vast space of ideas here, and it's impossible to do justice to it all in just a single piece. But our hope is that this essay serves as a rallying cry for introducing more people to the goal of malleable software, and also proves to be a useful organizing resource for people already exploring this space. In a sense, this is the piece I wish I could have read 7 years ago when I was getting started on my research journey.
Not gonna lie, this one was challenging to write! I'm very grateful to have been able to collaborate with Josh, Peter and Todd to get it done. We also couldn't have done it without the help of colleagues and friends who gave us feedback on drafts—you know who you are.
Anyway, check out the full essay if this sounds interesting to you. And if you do read it, I'd love a reply here letting me know what you thought!
(FYI, you can read in print or PDF if you prefer—I know that's my personal preference for longer reads. Just click the link at the top of the web version; we tried to make the print layout fairly nice.)
Other writing
Since my last email update I've also written a couple short blog posts:
- Avoid the nightmare bicycle: you won't believe this one secret tip to avoid designing terrible products!
- Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs.
That's it for now, until next time!