A graphical thread visualizer for Mastodon with panning, zooming and keyboard shortcuts for structured parent/child/sibling navigation. Click on a message to copy its link to the clipboard so you can paste it into the browser.
A toy interpreter for Brainf**k after reading this post by Laurie Tratt.
Over the course of 2022, I've found myself gradually programming in a certain way that has been working really well. Here, let me show you a few examples, see if you can spot the pattern:
Minimal dependencies, easy to build, runs anywhere you can install apps without asking permission, thoroughly tested, designed above all to reward curiosity about its internals.
LuaML is a simple hierarchical box model for drawing shapes and text within rows and columns. Unlike HTML it has no syntax of its own; pages are just Lua literals. The core renderer generating shapes to draw is 50 lines of code.
As part of the Handmade Network wheel reinvention jam, I built an experimental UI for streamlining debug by print and allowing debug "prints" to include graphics.
pensieve.love is the graph-based note-taking UI I've wanted for some time for my 10+ years of notes spanning 500+MB of text. A fork of lines.love. Still in progress.
I've been working on lines.love, an editor for plain text where you can also seamlessly insert line drawings.
At FOSDEM 2022 I presented Teliva, a platform for habitable and auditable text-mode apps.
Some short demos about it:
I spent the pandemic year reading a lot of Peter Hamilton. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it; they all blur together after a while, and I start to wonder if they aren't perhaps all the same story…
Regardless, the first Peter Hamilton I read, Pandora's Star, still sticks with me for a motif that didn't come together until right at the end: the Silfen Paths. In this universe humanity has portals that can span light years, often conveying train service between star systems, but there are occasional legends of an older interstellar network by an ancient alien civilization. Needless to say, our intrepid protagonist manages to get on this network. And suffers years of privation and amazing adventures (while everyone else in the novel is moving the story forward) before coming out the other end. Unlike the portals created by humans, the Silfen paths don't contain abrupt transitions between two points in space. Things blend together more gradually. Also unlike portals, the Silfen Paths aren't in the traveller's control. Instead, to go forth on the paths is to open oneself to the new, the unexpected. Extreme heat and cold. Danger. The occasional prancing Silfen who'll happen upon you and help you out, but who doesn't quite seem to get the idea of “home,” or that you're trying to get there, before outpacing you again, inevitably leaving you behind to find your own path through the maze.