a channel i follow on youtube (Creativity Labs) ju...
# linking-together
g
a channel i follow on youtube (Creativity Labs) just released three absolutely banger prototype videos in the last hour •

first

data visualization with a really neat linked code<->text description interface •

second

interactive programming visualizer/debugger that’s kind of like the next, more-interactive step for a lot of Bret Victor’s little diagrams •

third

(ridiculously souped up logging that (in their example) hooks logs from the same place over time, associates them to elements on the page, enables filtering by call site, scope, and spatially on the page Are they members of this slack (no idea how i found the channel otherwise)?? If so, I’d love to get in touch!
j
Good stuff! This is coming out of Haijun Jia's lab at UCSD. They have been publishing good work for around ten years, an archive of which is here: https://creativity.ucsd.edu
i
[After watching the first video] This is fascinating stuff. I've been working on similar tooling, but with a totally different approach/perspective, since my team isn't at all interested in sequential data visualization, but rather sequential technical illustration. So it's fun to see what sorts of things are easier/harder about making this stuff approachable to non-coders when you design it around some expectation of data/stats literacy VS arts/visual communication proficiency. [After watching the second video] This is really neat. I feel like I'll have to watch this one a few times at least to really appreciate what they've done. Immediately, though, I love the attention to graphic design. [Third video] Not so hot on this one. [Meta-point] Garth, this YT channel slaps bumps grinds and rips so hard.
b
Log-it looks really interesting, I’ll watch the video later. The ad-hoc object exploration reminds me of dynamic tracing tools, like Erlang tracing or “production safe debuggers” like https://www.rookout.com (roughly speaking: query languages to select variables or properties to export into log stream during program execution, without any interruption). The context bits - while not exactly the same - make me think of honeycomb.io, where you ditch traditional logs in favor of emitting one big JSON object per “unit of work” (often, web request) and you pile fields into that object. The result is a lot of power to cross reference different parts of execution. Honeycomb in particular pairs it with some really smart visualization / interactive visual outlier identification tools.
g
the second one reminded me of Hest when they had the assignment value travel down the wire into the variable
j
Good stuff! I found the first one most interesting. Quite similar to some other stuff I've seen for mixing text and interactive visualizations. What was the name of Bret Victor's project before dynamic land? (http://play.witheve.com/, and maybe not so similar after all..). And wasn't someone here working on something similar as well? Not so sure about the second one. Seems maybe too disconnected from the code. I've seen a similar design that draws the control flow on top of code and liked it better. As about the third: Printing to csv and loading it up in Excel (as a data source) is underrated 🙂.
j
(ftr I don't think bret worked on eve, that was chris granger https://chris-granger.com/resume/)
j
Well no wonder I was having so difficult time googling the project 😅
m
Data Particles looks 🔥 . Really interested in language-oriented authoring tools.
o