A few weeks ago I started a new series of blog posts (or “newsletters”, in Substack parlance) about simplicity :

1 • On simplicity introduces the series with how my thinking about simplicity has changed over the years.

2 • Meaning-ful design connects simplicity to meaning making and coherence.

3 • Familiarity explores how complex things can be surprisingly simple and why we can’t ignore context.

4 • Reciprocal realization frames design as a complex dynamic process of mutual adaptation between designer and designed object.

… I expect about four or five more posts coming after that, but I haven’t written them yet, so I have no idea. 🙂

A lot of this draws on 4E cognitive science, design theory, and philosophy. As such it may perhaps be less technical than you would expect it to be, although I try much harder in this series to relate it more directly to programming and software development than in my last.

And that’s why I post it here, today. I’m hoping to learn if this resonates at all with a technical audience, or if this is still too abstract. I know we’re all craving for the easily applicable Top 10 Things to Make Things Simple (and number 6 will surprise you), but I have reason to believe that it’s just not that… well… simple. But I think I’m slowly making progress towards synthesizing something valuable, even if I can’t express it as beautifully as I would like to. Yet.

Let me know what you think, and please ask any questions you may have (in thread or via DM). Appreciate your feedback!

Odd feeling: I just opened a terminal, did a double-take and knew instantly there was a leap year bug in code I wrote almost 25 years ago.

Explorable binary operations' progress report:

• Program outline
• Expand for instruction details and step execution

first time I include it in the book 🙂

The kids and I had a blast playing Baba is You this morning, and it brought up ancient memories of playing Sokoban puzzles (where all you can do push crates around; in particular no pulling). Now I want to play Sokoban on my phone.

lcamtuf.coredump.cx/sir-box-a-lot contains 300 publicly available Sokoban puzzles. It turns out the C syntax that those puzzles are encoded in is just a few search-and-replaces from being perfectly valid and usable Lua. So far I can render the starting state.