I'd encourage folks here to submit to the PX/26 workshop. Here's how they describe it:

Some programming feels fun, other programming feels annoying. Why?

For a while now the study of programming has forced improvements to be described through the Fordist lens of usability and productivity, where the thing that matters is how much software can get built, how quickly.

But along the way, something has gone missing. What makes programmers feel the way they do when they’re programming? It’s not usually fun to spend an age doing something that could have been done easily, so efficiency and usability still matter, but they’re not the end of the story.

Some environments, activities, contexts, languages, infrastructures make programming feel alive, others feel like working in a bureaucracy. This is not purely technologically determined, writing Lisp to do your taxes probably still isn’t fun, but it’s also not technologically neutral, writing XML to produce performance art is still likely to be <bureaucratic></bureaucratic>.

Whilst we can probably mostly agree about what isn’t fun, what is remains more personal and without a space within the academy to describe it.

PX set its focus on questions like: Do programmers create > text > that is transformed into running > behavior > (the old way), or do they operate on behavior directly ( > “liveness” > ); are they exploring the > live domain > to understand the true nature of the requirements; are they > like authors creating new worlds > ; does > visualization > matter; is the experience > immediate, immersive, vivid and continuous > ; do > fluency, literacy, and learning > matter; do they build > tools > , > meta-tools > ; are they creating > languages > to express new concepts quickly and easily; and curiously, is > joy > relevant to the experience?

PX also covers > the experience that programmers have > . What makes it and what breaks it? For whom? What can we build to share the joy of programming with others?

Here is a list of topic areas to get you thinking:

• creating programs
• experience of programming
• exploratory programming
• liveness
• non-standard tools
• visual, auditory, tactile, and other non-textual
• languages
• text and more than text
• program understanding
• domain-specific languages
• psychology of programming
• error tolerance
• user studies
• theories about all that

Correctness, performance, standard tools, foundations, and text-as-program are important traditional research areas, but the experience of programming and how to improve and evolve it are the focus of this workshop. We also welcome a wide spectrum of contributions on programming experience .

The submission deadline is Friday !

The Substrates 2026 workshop may also be of interest here:

An increasing number of researchers see their work as interactive authoring tools or software substrates for interactive computational media. By talking about “authoring tools”, we remove the divide between programmers and users; “software substrates” let us look beyond conventional programming languages and systems; and “interactive computational media” promises a more malleable and adaptable notion of tools for thought we are striving for. This workshop aims to bring together a wide range of perspectives on these matters.

Researchers in education, design, and software systems alike have long explored how computation can become visible and adaptable to its users, from diSessa’s learner-centered Boxer microworlds of the 80s, Hypercard, and Maclean et al’s Buttons. Even mundane systems such as spreadsheets blur the distinction between use and creation.

The notion of a substrate is an umbrella for many different traditions which are bringing local agency over software systems.

[...many more words, see the site!...]

We welcome participation from workers from academia, industry, independent scholars, and others, from any of the communities named above, and from any others who can see their goals reflected in the substrate agenda.

The submission deadline for this workshop is 2026-02-20.

Just a small shout-out. I keep coming back to Mariano Guerra's No-code History blog posts. They're such a great way to start learning about (or page back in) some of the most interesting, historically significant projects in our field. Each has a nice summary of the project and historical context, a bunch of quotes and videos and extracts, and then canonical resources for digging deeper. Wonderful stuff.

• Pygmalion
• Geometry Theorem Machine
• GRAIL
• Frox
• Sketchpad
• Peridot
• Lotus Improv

So — thank you, Mariano!

I've been doing some deeper research about Sketchpad lately, and only just discovered that the Computer History Museum has a wonderful online collection. You can create an account, and then browse through their archives adding items to your own little personal collections. For whatever reason, this "it's bookmarks, but just for this one website" feels really nice to me?

What sort of stuff will you find on the CHM website?

• 200 photos of modules from the TX-2, for some reason!!
• A coffee mug branded Evans & Sutherland, who pioneered head-mounted displays and did a bunch of early work in 3d graphics
• Almost 500 oral history videos (why did I only put the hyperlink on "oral"? am I having a laugh?)
• The source code for Photoshop version 1.01 — don't sleep on the delightful photos of the Knoll brothers at the top of this post. Someone should put these on a tee shirt.
• A video of magnetic RAM (okay, now you're just being daft on purpose).

For some reason, I find the CHM youtube channel irritating, but love browsing their website. And that reason is design. The website feels like the website of a computer history museum. That's a nice feeling. (Can you imagine if the Exploratorium had a website that felt like the Exploratorium? Why the hell haven't they done that?)

Last one for now — Bitsavers has an incredible archive of software, photos, PDFs, magazines, and other historical materials. A real goldmine if you're looking to place yourself, say, back at MIT in '63.

redblobgames has released a bookmarklet which attaches a codemirror with linked scrubbing (alt-drag any number) to arbitrary SVGs, including illustrations and data visualizations. the utility is limited only by the readability of your SVG's textual representation

redblobgames.com/x/2550-scrubbable-codemirror