I've been drawing for a couple of years now, and also creating debug UIs inspired by Glamorous Toolkit. It's surreal to see Simon Wardley and Tudor Girba collaborating.

How did you start mapping?

I don't follow, can you elaborate? Is this about tools or something else potentially more interesting?

the Wardley maps. How did you actually started doing that? I know abut this tool/concept for a year approx, but didn't really dived into. It looks promising and interesting but cant find a way to get closer to it

Ooh thanks for the reminder! I saw Tudor tweet about this the other day but forgot to bookmark it to check it out

@Alex Bender Yeah, that's a good point. I first read about Wardley Maps in a corporate context, and whether they're of use there depends a lot on details of the corporate culture, who's trying to drive change, and so on. Politics. But the muddy picture became much more clear when I started trying to answer supply-chain questions in my personal life. Then abstract "user value" became personal value to myself. Here's an example map I made for myself, about a question that dominates my thoughts: what software to depend on that will maximize my own agency. I used a janky tool for this, basically just the ability to draw boxes and arrows overlaid on a static background with the 4 columns. I haven't even labeled the columns as you can see. But it helps me see choke points in my supply chain (places where I have to use one specific thing in a row, and I can't choose between multiple alternatives.

i really like amount of interesting tools you have and you build

Thanks so much! Yeah, for me the last couple of years have been a reframing of the Future of Software from "influencing popular culture by writing code" to "using computers to improve my own thinking".

looks like it's the bifurcation point where time splits and I'm gonna go by path which explores your tools and projects

@Alex Bender That's time well spent. I have been following @Kartik Agaram's toolbox for a while, and it has been a great inspiration for me although I don't actually use any of it myself right now (because my priorities and my computational environments are different).

Hey @Konrad Hinsen, can you share a bit what is you're focusing on please? I remember your name was mentioned in conversation with Ward at Federated Wiki calls but I can't remember the context

@Alex Bender My main use for computers is professionally in computational science, but then I tend to use much of the same toolbox for personal information/knowledge management etc. Like @Kartik Agaram, I have increasing individual agency high up on my list of priorities. I want simple tools that an individual can understand and adapt with reasonable effort. But since I work professionally with big data, highly structured data, and lengthy computations, plus tons of legacy software I have to interface with, I write for desktop systems (not Web, not cloud, not mobile) and need to keep an eye on efficiency (though not exclusively). Which is how I ended up with Common Lisp as my main environment, after more than 20 years of Python that ended with the observation that today's Python is no longer suited for individuals or small teams if they care about their agency. I don't remember in which context I was mentioned on Federated Wiki. Maybe it was about my use of Glamorous Toolkit, which is what I'd use for everything if UX were the only criterion to apply.

oh, that sounds interesting. I'm in python ecosystem for 12 years already and now I'm looking around with some knowledge. Lisp is very attractive, and smalltalk as well. And lua is on the list as well. Do you store your knowledge base as wiki system or use something else?

The core is an org-roam database in Emacs, which is just a bunch of plain text files. I also have non-Emacs tools to process it, e.g. for exporting to TiddlyWiki for consumption (read-only) on mobile devices.

Oh, I remember seeing that in GT discord!

@Konrad Hinsen I came across your early professional work in python through MMTK (as a former computational biophysicist). Do you use Common Lisp for molecular modeling/analysis now?

@Naveen Michaud-Agrawal Not much so far, but I do intend to use Common Lisp for any new tools I work on. I don't rewrite code for the fun of it, meaning that I continue to use MMTK wherever it is applicable, even if I don't intend to work on MMTK itself any more. It works well enough in a Guix-based time capsule.