Last September, I decided that it was time to get a programming job again. After two months of trying to find paid work (of any kind, $10 would have been great!) as a composer, I realized that it’s really hard. There are a lot of people willing to work for free, and without much of a scoring portfolio (as opposed to the “pure music” I do) I have no way to distinguish myself to the studios that have a budget. Also, a lot of games want orchestral scores, and I don’t have the hardware and software I need to make convincing-sounding synthetic orchestral scores. Also, I’m sure once I get the necessary hardware and software, I will need time to practice with it. In short, I needed money and time. I am extremely fortunate to have, in my free-flowing way, stumbled onto a skill that is valued by the economy, and so I decided it was once again time to utilize that skill to achieve my other goals. I planned to live reasonably cheaply, save up money so that I can buy equipment and support myself for enough time to build up a portfolio by doing free projects.
Now I have been programming for Clozure for almost six months. As far as jobs go, it’s great. I get to work in my favorite language, Haskell, and they give me enough freedom to experiment with designs and come up with solutions that not only work, but that I would even consider good. My fear of programming jobs was based on having jobs where I constantly have to compromise my values, either by working in crappy languages or on startup-style timelines where there is no time to lose. With this job, I feel reunited with my love of software, and my inspirations for developer support tools have been once again ignited.
And so I have amended the plan: after I have saved enough money to support myself for several years, I will not only attempt to bootstrap a career composing, but dedicate my current work week to making a reality the software ideas which have been floating around in my head for half a decade. This prospect really excites me — the reason I have not been able to make my ideas is mostly the time pressure: there’s was always something else I should be doing, and so I always felt guilty working on my pet projects. I wonder, what am I capable of if my pet projects are the main thing?
I want to revive CodeCatalog. Max and I lost steam on that project for a number of reasons.
- Due to family pressure, I returned to school.
- I fell in love with a girl and got my heart all broken. That can be kind of a downer.
- The priorities of the project compromised my vision. We were attempting to use modern wisdom to make the project successful: first impressions and intuitive usability came first. Our focus was on making it pretty and satisfying to use (which took a long time since neither of us were experienced web front-end developers), and that required me to strip off the most interesting parts of the project because noobs wouldn’t immediately understand it.
So I want to re-orient (3) to make it more satisfying for me. I want to allow myself to make the large strides that I envisage rather than baby-stepping toward success — to encourage myself to use my own talents in design and abstraction rather than trying to be a front-end person, to emphasize the exciting parts (what Audrey Tang calles -Ofun). By funding myself, I will not feel the guilt that comes with working on a project at the same time as (1). I can do no more than hope that something like (2) doesn’t happen. (I have a wonderful, stable and supportive relationship right now, so if that continues, that’d cover it :-)
I have many ideas; the reason I want to return to CodeCatalog in particular is mainly because I have identified most of my ideas as aspects of this project. My specific fancies change frequently (usually to things I have thought about before but never implemented), and so by focusing on this project in a researchy rather than producty way, I can entertain them while still working toward a larger goal and eventually benefitting the community.
Here is a summary of some ideas that fit in the CodeCatalog umbrella (just because I’m excited and want to remember):
- Inter-project version control — I have always been frustrated by the inability of git and hg to merge two projects while still allowing interoperation with where they came from. The “project” quantum seems arbitrary, and I want to globalize it.
- Package adapters — evolving the interface of a package without breaking users of the old interface by rewriting the old package in terms of the new one. There is a great deal that can be done automatically in this area with sufficient knowledge about the meaning of changes. I talked with Michael Sloan about this some, and some of the resulting ideas are contained in this writeup.
- Informal checked documentation — documenting the assumptions of code in a machine-readable semi-formal language, to get the computer to pair-program with you (e.g. you write a division x/y and you have no y /= 0 assumption in scope, you’d get a “documentation obligation” to explain in english why y can’t be 0).
- Structural editing — coding by transforming valid syntax trees. Yes it’d be cool, but the main reason it’s compelling to me is in its synergy with other features. Once you have the notion of focusing on expressions, holes with contextual information (a la Agda), semi-automatic creation of package and data-type adapters, smarter version control (e.g. a change might rename all references to an identifier, even the ones that weren’t there when the change was made) all come as natural extensions to the idea.
I think the challenge for me will be to focus on one of these for long enough to make it cool before getting distracted by another. My plan for that is to set short-term goals here on my blog and use it to keep myself in check. I am considering involving other people in my project as a way to keep myself focused (i.e. maybe I can make a little mini-kickstarter in which my devotees can pledge small amounts in exchange for me completing a specific goal on time).
This is all 12-18 months away, which feels like a long time, but in the grand scheme is not that long in exchange for what I see as the potential of this endeavor. I’m just excited and couldn’t help but to think about it and get pumped up. Thanks for reading!
Oh, despite the date, this is totally not an April Fools joke (as far as I know ;-).
