Hi, hope you had a great summer!

At Replit, we just released a Desktop App which I helped build. Go check it out and ping me with any issues or feature requests. I also have a couple of other things in the pipeline, if you want to have access to them early, turn on the "explorer" setting in your account.

Other than that, I've spent this quarter lazily working on a DIY Pen Plotter, and treating it as a stepping stone towards making a CNC. The plotter was designed and built completely from scratch, and I'm quite pleased with myself that it, in fact, does plot with a pen:

Adam Wiggins once told me that the best explanations are made by people who just learned something, as they haven't yet internalized that thing and forgotten what was hard about learning it. So, keeping that in mind, I wrote a blog post on building this project.

I also went to the last Strange Loop edition, it was amazing to see so many friends in one place, I had a ton of inspiring conversations, and the talks were great as well. I'm obviously sad that the conference is going away but grateful that we had it for a while.

What I've been reading lately:

• Bringing Design to Software — a great collection of essays edited by Terry Winograd; the book is a bit dated, but still a very interesting read
• Human-Machine Reconfigurations
• How to Solve It, a classic
• Where Mathematics Comes From — Lakoff's take on mathematics origins in metaphors
• Educating The Reflective Practitioner — second part to "The Reflective Practitioner"

On the web:

• Bidirectional Language Note from Elliot
• more typography in code editors
• Jimmy is making a text editor
• Differentiable Programming for Interactive Graphics
• The TTY demystified, and while we're on the topic of shells and terminals, a talk on a new terminal emulator written in Zig and another terminal emulator trying out some new interactions
• a talk on Unit — a cool visual programming language with very interesting semantics
• A Node-based Interface for Exploratory Creative Coding with Natural Language Prompts from Tyler
• this generative art project inspired by Calder's sculptures
• Building a String Art Machine

I'm going to SPLASH in Cascais at the end of October — let me know if you'll be there too, and if not — catch you in a couple of months!