Hi everyone 👋 I’ve been reading posts in this community for a while now, and I figure it may be time to finally introduce myself. @Florian Schulz and @hvrosen separately told me about it some time last year. They’re both awesome people working on impressive projects, so I knew I had to come here 🙂 My background is a mix of business, programming, and design. My business school experience was pretty disappointing, so I started teaching myself programming and selling iPhone apps on the side shortly after Apple had created the App Store. The apps were super simple and had moderate success. Following Apple’s guidelines and reading articles by other indie developers made me realize the importance of good design. That’s when I encountered Bret Victor’s essays for the first time, and they had a huge impact on me. I really enjoyed creating new products, and ended up moving from Poznań, Poland to Berlin, Germany, and working as a product designer for about ten years. I enjoyed product design, but felt limited in the sense that I could envision certain ideas, but was incapable of implementing them myself. And pushing the envelope was not always a priority at my clients’ companies (understandably so). So I decided to take some time off and invest in learning programming for real. After about three years of first learning programming fundamentals and then catching up with modern tools, I’m now building a paid learning resource and environment for people who want to learn CSS Flexbox layout. I’m following some of the guidelines outlined in Bret Victor’s Learnable Programming essay, like removing hidden state and letting you explore how a layout is constructed over time. My other inspirations are books like Uncommon Sense Teaching (Oakley, Rogowsky, Sejnowski) for creating a curriculum and tools that make learning accessible to everyone, and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud for employing visual communication and stories to better explain concepts. I effectively had to reverse engineer how a browser engine calculates this type of layout so that I could show all the intermediate states to the user. This has been pretty challenging, but I think it could really make learning much easier compared to what it is today. I’m hoping to launch it some time in 2022. I’m a little scared talking about this project at this stage, because it doesn’t completely implement Bret Victor’s vision yet. But after a long time off work, I feel like I might need to settle for something less than perfect so I can start supporting myself with this independent business. In terms of other projects, last year I was looking for better ways of modeling interfaces and got into statecharts. I really loved the original statecharts paper from David Harel. To get some practice, I built a replica of the wristwatch the author used for all the examples. The demo can be found at https://andyjakubowski.github.io/statechart-watch/, and the source code at https://github.com/andyjakubowski/statechart-watch. This ended up pretty long 😬 Anyway, I have huge respect for what you’re all working on in this community, and I’m looking forward to becoming a little more active here!

Currently struggling learning Flexbox, so if you need test users, let me know. :)

Oh nice @Jason Morris, I will!

Yay, welcome! 🙌

Hi Andy. Believe it or not, i think i've demo'ed your Citizen clock built with xstate literally to 100 people or more (some of them was in group trainings). Thanks a lot for creating it!

That’s so awesome @Tomas Čerkasas! I’m happy my watch is finding some use. What kind of group training did you use it in?

Į teach selected marketing technology and operations topics. #15 is about statemachines, where I do the demo of your clock. In a sense that if you want to model interaction of whole web page, you need a tool to do that, and state machines are fairly good at it. Old flyer I found in my desktop, it still is with mistake saying "Seiko" instead of "Citizen". And the "9 mln." is just a figure from my memory, but i read somewhere that this clock has about that much state. If you know the real answer, kindly please correct me 🙂

Fascinating! I haven’t run the numbers, but if you calculated the Cartesian product of all these orthogonal states, I suppose you could end up around 9 million states total 🙂

cc @crabl on the app interface modeling language you were playing with!

Hi Andy, welcome to the Future of Coding! I've just ordered a copy of Uncommon Sense Teaching, which I haven't heard mentioned here before (although perhaps I need to start watching this channel more in-depth!). Would love to connect for a call sometime to chat about better ways to model UI (I'll forward you a copy of the message I sent @hvrosen a while ago), as @Cole mentioned, I've got a toy language for modelling simple app interfaces that is in the "incubation" phase at the moment (https://crabl.net/experiments/breadboarder)

Hi @crabl! Breadboarder sounds cool! Interesting that you mentioned stack primitives a’la SwiftUI, I implemented that with CSS Flexbox some time myself 🙂 Would love to chat more and try out your approach, feel free to DM me, or shoot me an email at hello@andyjakubowski.com.

Hi andy! 😄

Oh hi @Christopher Shank 😃