Hey all, I’m Daniel! 👋 I came here via the podcast and have been lurking in Slack for a while. This is such an awesome community! About me: I just finished a stint at Recurse Center, where I was working on (and still am) Methodable, a “human-programming tool”. Or to put it another way, a tool for creating, storing, and following complex human workflows / routines / processes. I recently put out an extensive interactive guide (which is itself a human program, of course) about how to use Methodable and the theory behind it. I’m interested in question like: • How can non-technical people use programming to improve their lives? • How can we create fluid programmability without written syntax? How far do visual interfaces get us? • What things are people good at and what things are computers good at and how can we create programs that employ the strengths of both human and computer? I’m currently in San Francisco, and would be stoked to meet anyone out here! Or to meet people online, anyways, just excited to be here and see what you all are up to! 😃

✌🏼 I'm in SF too and looks like we have similar interests. If you want to meet up, dm me or email scottantipa@gmail.com

Awesome! Emailed you!

I love this project. Clearly useful and the design is great. One suggestion: create a space in Editor mode to record why a workflow looks as it does. Like, in your first example of picking a restaurant, why 3? What were the constraints you were juggling in your head when you came up with the workflow you did? What scenarios did you consider where some other approach fails? I think there's a fertile territory to explore here, because (particularly in organizations) it is too easy to have a business process (e.g. vendor procurement) that everyone has to follow, but nobody remembers why the process works as it does.

@Kartik Agaram that’s a great idea! Definitely one of my goals with the project is to provide better context about why someone might be doing what they are doing. So far my main attempt to make that possible is by making goal/sub-goal hierarchies a primitive of the system, since those relationships automatically provide some context (e.g. “you are doing this because you have this other overarching goal” (see the attached screenshot)). However, this context is limited, since you can only get so far with stacking imperative goals on top of each other to provide justification (to continue your example: a goal above the “choose a restaurant” program could look like “choose a restaurant in such a way that it takes less than five minutes using whatever number of restaurants is least likely to lead to an argument between the two parties…” you get the point, its possible but clearly not always an ideal way to phrase/structure the justification behind a program. One hidden feature the editor does have is inline comments: if you start an empty block with

#:

it’ll switch to a comment block that’s ignored by the control flow but visual in the editor, so that could be used to provide context. You’ve got me thinking though, maybe I could add a block that’s explicitly “contextualize/justify the parent block”, that, like the comment block, stays out of control flow, but unlike the comment block is somehow presented in guide mode. And that way a user wouldn’t have to be editing a program to get that context. I’ll let you know if I have more thoughts/build that!

Lets do a meetup in the bay area?

A meetup would be awesome! We can organize that in #CG8QU2QUU

Checklists come to mind.