I’ve started a podcast.

As I’ve been researching ways to build software more quickly, I’ve had many fascinating conversations with other people doing related work. Some over Zoom. Some walking around Dolores Park. Some circumnavigating the Panhandle.

A while ago, as I thought about these conversations, I realized that it was sad that no one else could listen in to what Geoffrey and David and many others were telling me. And I thought it would be nice to add one more pin in the landscape that comprises the tools for thought / no code / low code / game design community.

I’ve done two episodes so far.

The first was with Geoffrey Litt, an HCI researcher doing fascinating work on customizable software. We talked about:

• Potluck, Geoffrey’s latest experimental tool that lets a user start with a meaningful, unstructured document (like a recipe) and progressively enhance it with computation (like automatically adjusting timings).
• Trade-offs between: concrete use cases, building for others and giving research time to show results.
• Orienting thoughts about end user programming around the context the user is in, rather than who they are.

The second was with David Cole, the designer of the game making tool, Castle. We talked about:

• The design decisions that make it quick and accessible to build expressive games with Castle.
• How Castle eschews some goals (like teaching coding or enabling professional quality games) so it can nail its actual goals.
• The techniques Castle uses to let people use latent time on their phone to create, rather than consume.
• Why games are valuable as culture. And why it's worthwhile working on a tool to make games.
• How game design techniques like emergence can be applied to non-game software.

Subscribe to the podcast to hear about future episodes!

Part of Mary Rose Cook’s research to build software quickly