@paulsonnentag.bsky.social
No more killer apps, kill the app!
A screenshot of the Automerge landing page. It says "Version control for your data. Automerge is a local-first sync engine for multiplayer apps that works offline, prevents conflicts, and runs fast."
We have a shiny new website courtesy of @spiralganglion.com and @seaofclouds.com π
π Check it out: automerge.org
It's that time again: β¨weβre hiringβ¨
We're looking for a @godotengine.org IDE Engineer to help us build the next generation of collaboration tools inside the engine itself! More detail here: inkandswitch.com/jobs/godot-ide-engineer
(Remote role πππ)
12 exciting live-programming projects will be presented at LIVE this year. It's free, online, and coming up soon!
Sat 9/27: Videos premiere
Sat 10/4: Q & A and discussion over Zoom
Details on projects are up already at liveprog.org; more schedule & links coming soon.
Hope to see ya there!
hi hello my husband recently accepted a job in Victoria, BC so we are hoping to immigrate to Canada before the year is over
soooo i will be leaving my in-office IT job and be out of work again. shares and job leads welcome!
The Ink & Switch team is coming through London and we're having a social to share some recent news and research from the lab, and catch up with people in London interested in local first, malleable software, and other similar areas of making better computing.
Aug 16th, 6pm in London
Do you write TypeScript? Enjoy Automerge? Love building both tools and community? You might be a great fit for our β¨newβ¨ Automerge TypeScript Maintainer role!
www.inkandswitch.com/jobs/automer...
(Remote role, π¬π§ UK-based preferred but not required)
You can do things for their own sake without having to provide justification. But if you really need one, it's this: *things lead to other things.* Doing things opens up doors, ideas, pathways, and opportunities that couldn't have been imagined or designed without having first done those things. By definition, doing things you enjoy leads to more things you'll enjoy. It's another way of saying "the dots connect looking backwards", one of the three messages in Steve Jobs' (wonderful) commencement address at Stanford, but it keeps the frame in the present. Simply following one's curiosity βΒ even when it seems unproductive to do so βΒ is wildly underestimated as an activity that moves the human race forward. Feynman's spinning plates led to his Nobel prize. It's easy to lose motivation when it isn't clear how some work will contribute. But quite often, the biggest contribution something makes is the next thing it leads us into. We can't predict these paths in advance, but we can notice how much it has happened in the past, and trust that it will continue. This is one worth repeating early and often. Things lead to other things. It's a powerful reminder in the face of creative doubts. "What if this is nothing?" Doesn't matter, it will lead to something.
In creative work, there is this frustration while mid-process that reflects the delta between where a work is and where you want it to be. When it's gone, the work is done. This means that one is always experiencing this in the ongoing activity of their creative work. There's always a next problem to be solved, or a need to get some work away from some unsatisfying place, or toward some unknown more satisfying one. It isn't always clear, in fact, it's usually unclear, where to go β that's why it's so frustrating. We live with this frustration during the whole life of a creative work. You have to learn to embrace this frustration. The frustration sometimes feels like a despair born from fear that the work won't get better, that it won't ever meet your tastes. But it should be embraced: it's what tells you your work will get better, because it keeps your mind at the task of figuring how to improve it. It is a *good* frustration. Once you learn to embrace this frustration, you can start to enjoy it, which helps you enjoy your work more (which helps you do harder things). It helps to have gone through many resolutions of this frustration; that gives you the confidence to know early on in a creative project that it will, in time, dissipate, as you find your way through the nooks of creative revelation. But I've found that it seems to require revolutions in each domain; this frustration is hard to enjoy in a new field of creation, since this confidence has much less to ground itself on. It's important to be able to identify the good frustration. Simply being able to identify it can turn it from a source of negativity to one of excitement and energy. Once identified, it can become a source of action, sometimes even direction. In particularly challenging moments, this frustration can end early work. Pointing at this frustration, describing its source, and what about the work has led to it, is often all you need to think more clearly about how to proceed.
I furiously note-take my way into the depths of a project. These notes become Ariadne's thread; when I'm deep in the details and I've lost sense of the project's purpose β which I need to color my interpretation of the details, including filtering out those that do not matter, and to direct my next actions β I can return to those notes which pull me into the right perspective again. They are also helpful when writing descriptions of the project for public consumption; once I know the inner-most details, challenges, rewarding pieces, etc., it becomes much harder to describe the project from the outside. I'm now a native to the project, and I can no longer give a newcomer directions that make any sense to them. The original notes serve this purpose wonderfully. David Bowie: > Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society. I've found it necessary to document that spark from first flint to the first moment of forgetfulness.
The creator's mind can often fall into a perfectionist's trap: "It must first be *right*, then it can be." Obsession grows with something being perfect, more perfect, more than perfect. This will grind work to a halt. We hold on too tight. In these times, it's important to reorient to experimentation and consistency. It is at these times that I must catch the down-spiral early, and instead refocus my obsession on consistent work and progress. Striving for consistency inevitably leads to quality; striving for quality inevitably destroys consistency. This advice does not necessarily supersede the need to acknowledge oneβs seasonal creative phases or to give into good distractions. So this may not be the right advice at all times, but you'll know the times when it is, because it'll annoy you. And it's important to remember: **Diverse inputs create rich outputs**. This happens in big ways and small. On the latter: at some surprisingly early point, doing a lot more of the work won't make it any better, but doing a lot of *other* things will. On the former: one must cultivate an interest in and understanding of many different things. Each field has different ways of seeing the world, and each person has still more nuanced takes. Adopting many lenses helps us see creative solutions to the ever-harder problems we and the world will face. Different lenses are one of the great gifts we get from reading, inquisitive conversation, and following obsessions down deep paths.
Completed another trip around the sun this week. With gratitude, something to share:
Creative work is hilariously unintuitive to the adult mind. We are like beavers, blocking flow at the first sound of running water with dams made of any debris around.
Here are reminders I hold close:
(1/2)
This is the platonic ideal of sniffing
18.07.2025 19:23 β π 5605 π 1446 π¬ 103 π 133One week until MONDAY, JULY 21st, which I call "LIVE Workshop Christmas".
(It's Christmas for me and the PC, cuz we get to look at all the cool stuff you submit! I guess for you it's more like "the submission deadline".)
liveprog.org
Automerge 3 is here: the heart transplant is complete! Huge improvements in memory usage and (in most cases) correspondingly big performance improvements too. Backwards compatible on disk and the network so there's no reason not to upgrade today: automerge.org/blog/automer...
15.07.2025 06:04 β π 130 π 32 π¬ 4 π 4A few different Ink & Switch projects have used Ohmβ¦here's the latest one.
From @alexwarth.bsky.social (co-creator of Ohm) and @geoffreylitt.com (who made Wildcard, one of our all-time favourite Ohm-powered projects)
BTW: I'm slowly assembling a LIVE Primer to help folk submitting to LIVE (& others) get the lay of the land. Please take a look and let me know what's missing, what sucks, what's rad, etc.
live-workshop.github.io/primer/
New longform @inkandswitch.com essay! π
Malleable Software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
by me, @joshuahhh.com, @pvh.ca and @seaofclouds.com
inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...
It's about why people need agency over their software tools, and how to make that happen.
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
www.inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...
After 4 years of work, I'm incredibly excited to introduce LiveStore, the next-gen data layer I'm building for Overtone.
It's based on reactive SQLite and has a built-in sync engine. Give it a try - would love your feedback!
We will post more updates here: www.inkandswitch.com/project/beck...
16.05.2025 05:38 β π 3 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Computational Public Space. A talk about a values-driven approach to integrating computation into cities. (40 min)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixP...
One benefit that our system has that we store scene files as structured data instead of lines of text this makes it easier to merge concurrent changes and detect conflicts. We are still working on how to expose conflicts in the interface.
15.05.2025 16:55 β π 2 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Sign up here: forms.gle/9MNsGmpifG4W...
15.05.2025 10:12 β π 5 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0What if you didn't need git to collaborate on games?
We've been prototyping a new approach to collaboration in Godot: live and async collaborative editing, with branches and diffs, built right into the editor.
We're looking for people to test out an early version, see link in next post:
Great talk by @pvh.ca on how @inkandswitch.com goes about doing impactful research youtu.be/w7DVlI_Ztq8?...
13.05.2025 08:41 β π 28 π 5 π¬ 0 π 0Here's a cut of some of my interactive and visual work from the past year.
I'm looking for work! I'm looking for remote work developing, prototyping and/or researching on editors, custom interactive things, or visualizations. I mostly work in JS/TS. Let me know if you know something pls ty :)
It doesnβt matter if theyβre βcoming for you next.β Even if your position and your privilege will ALWAYS protect you and everyone you love, it is your job as a conscious human being to fight for justice. Thatβs just the way it fucking is.
You donβt get to abdicate that responsibility.
people find their own use for tools
11.04.2025 09:19 β π 19 π 4 π¬ 1 π 1
a mysterious geometric logo
This is the logo for a new Ink & Switch research track. What are your guesses for the name of this research area?
28.03.2025 18:34 β π 41 π 7 π¬ 18 π 0Photoshop for text. In our #CHI2025 paper βTextoshopβ, we explore how interactions inspired by drawing software can help edit text. We consider words as pixels, sentences as regions, and tones as colours. #HCI #NLProc #LLMs #AI Thread π§΅
(1/10)
any Canadian game dev studios hiring rn just curious haha
02.02.2025 23:29 β π 231 π 107 π¬ 5 π 1Turns out the secret to loving junk mail: Buying a paper shredder. Now every promotional flyer becomes a satisfying destruction ritual.
Making things more fun is an underrated strategy.
Learn Wasm by building a simple compiler in JavaScript. No compiler expertise necessary. All the code is in the book; we'll take you through it step by step. Get your hands dirty and see for yourself what WebAssembly is all about.
Excited to announce the official launch of our online book, WebAssembly from the Ground Up! π
It's the book we wish we'd had 3 years ago.
No messing with tools and frameworks. It's a hands-on guide to the core of Wasm: the instruction set and module format.
Link below. π
