We now have a YouTube channel for the community: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_z2YnSvNaG0ljKgj-Vt2jg We can use it for whatever we want — demos, recordings of our virtual meetups, dispatches from the field, etc. • If you would like me to upload a video of yours, DM me and we'll figure out the details (file transfer, thumbnail, when it should be published, etc) • If you would like to be added to the channel as a manager (which, I believe, allows you to upload videos yourself), DM me and we'll set that up. I'm going to proceed assuming good faith. If anyone uploads way too many videos or otherwise abuses the audience, we'll alter course accordingly. • The moment we hit 100 subscribers, I'll give the channel a nicer URL. (Sigh)

Great, I just joined. So just out of interest, who is behind FoC and how is the admin team structured?

It was started by Steve Krouse. He recently decided to step away, and handed the role of "leader" (for lack of a better term) to me. Here's his blog post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/32445075 The community is small and casual, so I'm doing my best to let it become whatever folks want it to become. People have been fantastic about self-organizing — virtual meetups, physical meetups, one-on-one video chats, reading groups, etc. If there's something you want to try, just make some noise and it'll happen.

Hi Ivan, Ok, a nice read, a bit sad to read that Steve has pulled out. How about you Ivan, is this a long term (is 20+ years) thing for you? I guess I am asking as I have been interested in this stuff for 25 years so I want to make sure that I share a community with people who are in it for the long term, not just people trying to get rich quick making the next big thing

I'm the lead programmer at a small company that makes educational media, and I spend most of my time building tools for our artist-programmers. I've had the same job for 13 years now. I live in a forest, thousands of km away from any of the tech hub cities. I'm about as far from the silicon valley get-rich-quick mindset as can be. I'm in my early 30s, and I look forward to having a long career making tools for artist-programmers. I joined this community quite early in its existence, and have been actively involved ever since. I'm keen to keep the community alive and thriving, as it's my best connection to other folks around the world working on similar things. Before this community existed, I was already following the chronicles of Bret Victor, Alan Kay, Rich Hickey, Joe Armstrong, and countless others, studying the history of HCI, fretting about forgotten ideas and bemoaning the dominant handful of modern tech monocultures. I'm thrilled to have discovered a vein of other folks interested in similar things, doing similar work. So yeah, I hope this community keeps going for quite some time to come. The past 25 years have been quite a wild ride. In some respects little has changed, and in others the world has been flipped on its head. Where have you been all that time? What other communities have you been a part of? Anything you'd like to encourage me to do, or caution me against, if my interest is in ensuring the longevity of this community?

@Ivan Reese Nice to hear a really honest answer, thanks! For me, after seeing thousands of companies say they will reinvent programming with their new tools or techniques I do not know what will work, but I have definitely seen patterns of what won't work: • Closed source - Sure, you can make money and do some great dev stuff (like some .net stuff or VB for the 1990s) but none of these revolutionized development. • Core language not community owned - So many people try to "own" the language as soon as they smell the money which forces them to make bad or short term decisions • Thinking short term (ie: 5 years timespan which is typical startup timespan) - The problem of reinventing programming is a problem that people have tried to solve, thousands, maybe 100s of thousands of times and there is a lot of overconfidence in the area, and just to learn what has been done before could take 5 - 10 years so as not to repeat the mistakes that those who tried it before made I guess as the community lead people will look to you for direction on this stuff, to provide roadmaps for categories of problems being solved, and what we have already tried, so that community members can get up to speed on targetting new areas of research instead of just going down the same blind alleys every time. This means setting up conferences, webinars for us all and stuff like that. Keeping the community going can be thankless hard work and is fun while it grows, the real test is when noone else cares 😞 Anyway, to answer your question about where I have been for the past 25 years, don't follow my example, as when I was in my early 20s and 30s I just wasted my time with trivial problems, thinking I would get rich quick from it. I hope the people in this community are nothing like I was when I was younger, and that people here really want to re-invent programming. I did try to join several different programming groups over the last 25 years, but the founders either found a way to sell stuff and then forgot about reinventing programming, or they gave up when they realised that things were going to be too hard and they couldn't find a way to make money, so money always got in the way. And I totally understand where they are coming from, I mean, why should someone waste time solving what may be an unsolvable problem when all their peers are getting rich! Anyway, as I said, I guess that I am the wrong person to know what will work as there is probably some 12 year old kid sitting somewhere who is inventing the future of programming and will do it in a weekend and surprise us all, and I am just talking as someone who has given up themselves and just copying something from the 1990s (VB6) as I have no better idea myself of how to solve the problem. Anyway, I guess based on your answer that you have done your homework on how people have tried to solve this problem by studying HCI, Bret Victor, etc, and that you have the right motivations to do this (not money) to have a good chance and making this community work long term, so I definitely support that! :)

Thanks for those thoughts and words of encouragement. It sounds like we're in agreement on priorities and what works, what doesn't. I've enjoyed all the comments you've been leaving on various threads so far, and look forward to engaging with you about all sorts of language/tool design ideas and whatever other fun places the community takes us.

Most of these have a video. But I had to mess around to view them. I used the link and then the download button https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/ Step 1 open a topic https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/coda.html Step 2 - share -> link .. use the share button to get the link Step 3 open the link, e.g. https://www.loom.com/share/29dff5647ad34aa98822585e6b184886 Step 4 download (view did not work for me)

Since this is the 'community' thread, I had a tangential question about the domain futureofcoding.org. Do you own it now, @Ivan Reese? Any specific plans for it? I think the homepage info is a bit out of date 😄.

@shalabh Steve still owns it, but I have commit access to the repo. I'm planning to update it when I publish the next podcast (which should be pretty soon here)

And while we're all adding loads of stuff to your plate, Ivan, can we also have a Code of Conduct plz? 😄

YES! I am totally keen on setting up a CoC. I think that'd be a fantastic addition to the community, and it's high on my list of things to do. There'll probably be some debate around it, but that'll be good debate to have. Glad to know I'm not alone in wanting this.