Hi, I'm Charlie from Cambridge, MA. I'm a programmer turned high school computer science teacher and I'm primarily interested in how kids learn to code. I write on the topic on my blog (some relevant posts here and here) and I'm working on a project for a new structured editor for beginners. My hypothesis is that we can get more people excited about programming by making it easier for beginners to make projects they care about. I would love to chat with anyone in the education/structured editor space and share notes!

Hi! I'm an interaction designer/creative tech/specialized generalist/educator/artist (depending on who you ask and when). I initially got into writing code as a means for creating interactive art. Later, while trying to do tangible & embodied interface research, I realised that our research artefacts were so bad and janky that I had no confidence in any of the results. So I learned to build better ones, which included a lot of programming. This made me pretty popular as a prototyper in our group of labs, so I got a lot of practice. Later (again) I learned more code for interactive art (again), and most recently I've been building sensors/equipment, analysis tools & interfaces, and prototypes for environmental monitoring (emission location and quantification). I learned on java and now mostly use c++ and javascript/typescript. Sometimes python if I really have to. I stumbled across this community on @Ivan Reese's LinkedIn profile haha and am glad to have found it! I'm only surprised I didn't join sooner. Regarding computer futurism - I've been dancing around the ideas of embodied interaction, tangible interfaces, and sensor-network-interfaces / distributed systems for a number of years. My experience in these fields mostly lies around fun and education. For example, using tangible interfaces to effectively increase cognitive bandwidth for learning by avoiding overloading the already saturated cognitive pathway occupied by sight and sound (touch uses different pathways). Or exploring how we might use (or recognize and avoid) embodied metaphors in computational systems as a tool of influence in persuasive gaming. Or how we might help others to understand and empathize with other cultures through embodied values and tangible artefacts. In the very near future I'm working on some fun things with blinky lights and simple interactions to be fun and silly and delightful. If anyone in AB/Edmonton is doing that kind of stuff, reach out! Here are some of my projects that might give you an idea of what I do: https://brendanmatkin.com/

Hello! I’m Mohit, a software engineer in Berlin, Germany. I was introduced to the Future of Coding community through @Maggie Appleton’s amazing essays while browsing the Internet and reading about digital gardens on Twitter. I was so excited to finally put words to something I enjoyed working with for a long time since I was in tech! Absolutely love the FoC podcast and the takes on various papers. I have previously tinkered with visual programming and I go back to the project frequently to add features or draw some learnings from it. My work is majorly in JS/TS and I work in a web platform team; I have always enjoyed working on meta products that let other people build on top of them (and hence my interest in language tools and this community). I also am inclined to use such models to make programming more accessible (esp. in remote parts of my home country (India)) and I like reading any research on these lines. In fact, the podcast has made me more interested in reading research and knowing more about computing history, and through it how it will look in the future. Looking forward to engaging with the community and attending any events that happen in/around Berlin. Would love to meet some of you!

Hello everyone, my name is Sylvain Estebe, I come from France, I was a music composer for 8 years before starting my studies in cognitive science. I’ve just finished my bachelor’s degree this year. I’m interested in human and animal cognition, artificial intelligence and programming. I’m currently in Norway for an internship studying the performance of a pianist using motion capture and eye-tracker. I look forward to chatting with you.

Hi folks, quick intro here. I am a Boston-based software developer just trying to get better at this humbling profession. Can’t recall when or how I stumbled across FoC, but the earlier podcasts with Hillel Wayne (TLA+) and Toby Schachman (Cuttle, Apparatus) stick out in my mind. Enjoying the reboot and can’t wait to “dive in” to the next episode. Long time goal to learn Prolog here.

Hi folks, I'm Dave. I develop software in Berlin. I was introduced to FoC by Jack Rusher circa the time we worked together on a Clojure notebook project. I'm curious about many aspects of FoC, especially the minutiae of software development workflows, such as patterns to support live coding. I also love to consider the future of our craft by better understanding its past.

Hi friends! I’ve just been lurking here. I’m Evan Conrad and I live in SF. I mostly tinker on things. If you find me in SF, I’ll probably try to draw you

Hi all! I'm based in Melbourne and am about a year into being 'proper' software developer and occasional designer. I currently work on an application for making timelines. Before that, I was an academic developing/teaching CAD tools for landscape architects, where I spent a lot of time in a visual programming environment (Grasshopper) and also explored some tangible-table style tools for landform design/simulation. My doctorate was exploring how to design CAD tools that could model natural systems by privileging change-over-time, rather than geometry, as the means of composing design ideas. I originally came to the FoC podcast when I was slightly obsessed with Orca, although I've mostly shifted over to Teletype for live-coding music. I enjoy the show's recent focus on key comp sci papers and love its approach to audio editing!

Hello everybody, I am Máté from Hungary. I am currently between jobs, but I worked as a game developer before, mainly on gameplay and UI areas. Since I finished university around 6 years ago I am interested in exploring all the facets of software development and interested in moving the discipline forward. My personal project is working on tooling that can visualize existing text-based code in visual format, and I am generally interested in code visualization and software comprehension. I am also fond of topics related to software architecture, design, domain languages and programming language design. Other than that in my jobs I worked with various desktop and js/web based UI frameworks, proprietary game engines, databases, small scale webservers, and I helped in writing a package manager for a company, and a codebase migration tool. For non-programming related topics I love learning about psychology, philosophy, history, and I love comics 🙂 I just found this community, and I am really excited to discuss these topics with others who are also interested in them. I would love to find a job where I can work on these or at least contribute to them in my free time.

Hi folks, I'm Grant. longtime (podcast) listener checking in from Raleigh, NC. Still taking the temperature on this community but I'd probably position my work on the practical side of things; I'm interested in new ideas insofar as they help me make the end products I dream about making, and more easily. To that end I've been building out my own local-first/crdt/multiplayer framework for the web for the sake of building the grocery list of my dreams and I've been having a lot of fun with that. I'm in a bit of a lull at the moment and busy with a new kid, but I'm interested to see if there's any local connections in Raleigh in this community. I get fomo from all those cool London demo meetups.

Hello all, greetings from Quadra Island, BC. I've been listening to the podcast for a little while now, and slowly working my way backward from what's current. Professional life started with mostly Unix-like systems, plenty of server-side web tech, from CGI onwards. I've morphed into infosec consulting of various flavours for the last 16 or so years, but still messing about with software where it helps me scratch some itch. Lisps and functional languages are recurring themes. Outside of work, there's walking our dogs on the shores of paradise, and volunteer work as a firefighter. Who needs sleep?

Hi Future of Coding folk! I am Sam. I realized I had never introduced myself here even though I have been around for a while. I am a Software Engineer from Brazil. I have been into programming for the past 10 years. All this time I felt there was something suboptimal with the way we program today, both for fun and for work. That’s what motivated to start the unit project https://unit.md. My initial approach for creating a new visual language was to go reference-less, so I would have to implement it from scratch, based mostly on intuition. I also wanted unit to feel like an “alien tool”, untied from the current state of the art aesthetics and user experience. I felt we had all these cool Computer Science, Systems Programming and Design concepts, but no readily accessible fully visual system attempting to incorporate them all. My take was that this was a fundamentally a Software Engineering problem; it would likely take years for one to develop something like that. One day a friend saw the prototype and mentioned Victor Bret. Later I was touched watching “Inventing on Principle”. That was my entrance to this rabbit hole; you know the rest. I can simply hear Allan Kay say something like “Recursive Design” and that is it. That is enough for me to start pursuing an year long new system feature. I usually come here looking for some inspiration. Maybe some Programming Language concept I haven’t heard of, a fancy Structured Editing demo or some curated paper. It is impossible to compress all the cool stuff! Finally, I am very thankful for the existence of this community! Good job everyone!

Hello! I stumbled across the podcast recently and have been working my way through the back catalog -- been totally blown away, tons of material I've never scratched the surface of. I studied music tech in school, so have spent a lot of time getting jaded about the Max/MSP workflow, and was very excited to see the discussion of broader approaches to graphical programming because I kind of wrote the whole thing off for a while there. I'm big on NixOS and functional programming and other stuff. Also was excited to see the Alberta representation, I'm in Edmonton!

cheers. i’m Rand, and relatively new to NYC. i have over 25 years in product and engineering. long history in machine learning, computational linguistics, and distributed systems. i’m helping lead product here and there while i get my own AI-adjacent product built. making data and complex systems more humane and accessible is my jam.

hi i'm rachel! i'm not a software engineer but i've worked closely with developers for the past 8+ years and i've always wanted to build my own app... now, with generative AI, i've been able to start an iOS app from scratch without much coding experience.. it isn't perfect and an iOS engineer would do a much better job, but I am finding it really exciting what AI can do in terms of lowering technical barriers and getting non engineers involved in code. specifically interested in LLMs / tools / techniques that can help you build products and generate working code. reach out if you have any tips or suggestions!

Hello! I'm VoxelRifts, a college student and have been programming for the past 5 years. I'm self taught and have a deep appreciation for low level and graphics programming and making things from scratch. Joined here as recommended by @Allen Webster because I was theorycrafting a "reverse game engine" where the focus would be on textual programming with smaller editors instead of the other way round. Glad to be here!

Hi all I am Avon, my background is in music (guitar + pure data) and delay tolerant networking. I actually found future of coding through the podcast episode with pd creator Miller Puckette. My current interest is in building collaborative, itemized, computing environments, inspired by the writings of Alexander Obenauer. The current path I'm taking towards this goal is working with Project Mage, and trying to connect Mage's data representation system called KR, to a delay-tolerant data synchronization protocol called Bramble. You can read more about this idea here: https://lists.sr.ht/~project-mage/discussions/%3C6fb9dbc5-1c58-cf36-5dcb-8cd1813e3cc4%40gmail.com%3E My overarching goal with this work is to build the tools necessary to create multi-computer, collaborative computing environments. Initially this is just going to be software, but eventually I would like to branch into physical environments and explore how this software interacts with alternative human computer interfaces like Dynamicland, possibly paired with modular building systems like OpenStructures and GridBeams. Feeling really grateful that I found a community of others interested in similar ideas. 😃 Cheers, Avon (@t400@iffy.info)

Hello Folks, I am Shobhit from India. Fascinated by the world of decentralised Web. I landed here, as I am exploring the set of ideas for my next startup around social graphs. Small intro here - https://sinisterlight.com/about

Hi folks, I’m prabhanshu from Bangalore. I’ve been researching spreadsheets and how they enable end user programming for some time now. I came across this Slack from @Maggie Appleton’s work. I’ve found a lot of useful ideas here. Much thanks to everyone who’s put this community together. I’ve recently started building a “spreadsheet playground” with @Ravi Chandra Padmala where we’re thinking about the spreadsheet medium from the ground up. The idea is to acknowledge and improve spreadsheets as an environment for building small information systems. We’re looking at patterns from the programming/software-building world we can apply to simplify them a bit and make it easy to make reliable and maintainable spreadsheets. My background is in software building and we want to work with folks who have experience in HCI/PL/notation design. I’d love to talk if any of it sounds interesting :)

Hi everyone, I am Eugene and I am super excited to join this community (referred by @stevekrouse). I am a designer-turn-engineer and have been design tools in the app building space, most recently at Palantir. I've recently switched into research mode, thinking about how GenAI can help people, especially non-techies, build their own tools. I am writing and building prototypes around this idea and posting all these things here: https://blog.eugenechantk.me/?tag=appbuilding I am just in awe that there is a community out here that is thinking and working on what I am passionate about. Love to chat or meet up if anyone is in SF

Hi everyone designing the future of coding! I'm Stan, a developer by day and a calligrapher/design-geek by night. (Had my 15 mins of Instagram fame doing calligraphy on the beach! https://www.instagram.com/wanderingstan ) It's bugged me that the visual design of code has stagnated in the 20+ years since the advent of syntax highlighting. (Modulo the arguments over coding ligatures!) What would it look like to prioritize visual design in editors and in new languages? And can this be done while maintaining essential properties of code? I'm working on some blog posts/manifestos/essays on the subject (super-rough-draft attached), and a live prototype. Would love to connect with those building editors or languages for whom this idea resonates, and with designers who see code as a unique but powerful design challenge. Short bio: Was founder of a couple startups (sovrn.com, wordnik.com), early employee at many more. Most recently design prototyper in Meta AR Research. Thanks to @Gabriel Pickard for pointing me to this group!

Hi all 🙂 I'm Elliot. I have a text-visual-hybrid code editor project called Polytope in which I'm currently working on caret navigation in visual editors, and a local-first multiplayer editor creation api. @Lu Wilson invited me to join this community... I should've joined long ago! Here's some history of my interest in the space: I found out about the FoC podcast at a coding club in Waterloo in 2019. I remember Ravi Chugh's Sketch-n-Sketch really caught my attention back then. Way before that, I think when I was getting more into hobby web development, coming from hobby game development, I watched Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" which inspired me. I love learning about people's FoC projects and visions. Many of you in this slack have really inspired me! I'm currently doing some contracting, working on Polytope, learning some math, and figuring out what to do next in my career.

Hi everyone, I’m Alex, and I like thinking and prototyping design and academic research tools. Super stoked to be part of this community! I’m a quant trader by day, but I really enjoy prototyping research tools after work and during the weekends (particularly in academic research). The design space for computing is so rich, I’m always dumbfounded and excited by all the possibilities. I find a lot of inspiration from the typical suspects: Alan Kay, Bret Victor, Maggie Appleton, Douglas Engelbart, etc. I write down some of my thoughts on my blog from time-to-time. If anyone is in Chicago, I’d love to chat and/or meetup 🙂 Nice to meet you all!

Hi everyone, I'm Chris. No fancy bio, just a Rwandan software developer currently based in South Africa, disenchanted with the present dominant forms of computing and seeking solace and inspiration in the forgotten ideas from the history of this young field and the brave ideas for a different future, with an eye towards application in the developing world. I found an abundance of both kinds of ideas in the podcast and newsletter, which is how I ended up here. I'm grateful that this community exists and looking forward to contributing somehow :)

I am working on a similar idea. You don’t need a better programming language, you just need better, relational, programmable APIs. frest.substack.com/p/what-is-frest and computer-generated UIs. And a secure composition model.

👋 Hi! I've cracked it, I've figured out slack. I'm Devine, I live on a sailboat, I'm very bad with computers but I love tinkering. I love the podcast! and conlangs and esolangs, and drawing and writing music. Heading to Saint-Louis for Strange Loop in a few days. I'm curious to see what the future of coding has in store https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/now.html

Hello I'm Alex, and am interested in live coding music and heritage algorithms. I'm a non-academic research fellow at a small non-profit Then Try This, with a project exploring "algorithmic patterns" in a range of collaborations. I'm currently interested in fringe possibilities of hand drawn programming environments, and also how continuous and discrete patterns can be represented and combined together. I've been here before but struggle a bit with slack and tech culture, lets see if I can last this time 🙂

Hi everyone, I'm Jen. I'm originally from Puerto Rico, but currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. I started my career in software after teaching myself Javascript to help with repetitive tasks at my animation studio job. I think I was able to pick it up quickly because a decade before that, Geocities, MySpace, and Neopets had taught me to not be afraid of code-looking-things. I feel like there aren't many spaces like that anymore, so programmers are treated like wizards rather than fellow craftspeople. I would love to help create something that could facilitate art-making and leave the busywork to computers.

Hi! I'm Arcade, and I met a lot of the FoC folks at Strange Loop. @Ivan Reese and @Lu Wilson were especially nice to me, and made the conference quite wonderful :> I have been working on folk.computer recently, and if y'all are ever in ATL, hit me up!

Hi all! I'm Grey from San Diego, CA. I stumbled upon the community after getting into digital gardens and reading lots of Maggie Appleton's articles. Ironically, we've been doing a version of #linking-together at my day job for the last couple of years, so it's great to see so many people posting about all these topics. I've been interested in technology and art for a long time. I did well with programming in high school but didn't take it up as a profession until college. I started with graphic design, then moved into web design, front end, backend, and devops. I enjoy building with others, and love to see how people are continuing to use programming/the Internet as a creative medium. Other interests: cooking, reading, and writing content that past me would have found helpful 🧑‍💻