In particular, check out Lua Carousel, a lightweight programming environment for desktop and mobile devices.

I talk a lot here about using computers freely, how to select programs to use, how to decide if a program is trustworthy infrastructure one can safely depend on in the long term. I also spend my time building such infrastructure, because there isn't a lot of it out there. As I do so, I'm always acutely aware that I'm just not very good at it. At best I can claim I try to compensate for limited means with good, transparent intentions.

I just spent a month of my free time, off and on, rewriting the core of a program I've been using and incrementally modifying for 2 years. I've been becalmed since. Partly this is the regular cadence of my subconscious reflecting on what just happened, what I learned from it, taking some time to decide where to go next. But I'm also growing aware this time of a broader arc in my life: Read more →

The kids have been enjoying Baba is You, and watching them brought back pleasant memories for me of playing the classic crate-pushing game SUMENGKO. So I went looking and found a very nice project that has collected 300 classic publicly available Sokoban puzzles. Then of course I had to get it on my phone so I could play it anywhere. The result is the sokoban.love client.

rabbot.love is a little helper I whipped up to check the programs the kids were writing for a neat little paper computer.

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I finally decided to hang up a shingle on itch.io. My first app there is not a game. Lua Carousel is a lightweight environment for writing small, throwaway Lua and LÖVE programs. With many thanks to Mike Stein who helped me figure out how to get it working on iOS, this is my first truly cross-platform app, working on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.

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A little sudoku-like app for helping first-graders practice addition. This attempt at situated software for schooling got a little more use than spell-cards.love.

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crosstable.love is a little app I whipped up for tracking standings during the Cricket World Cup, just to avoid the drudgery of resorting rows as new results come in.

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It's a very common workflow. Type out a LÖVE app. Try running it. Get an error, go back to the source code.

How can we do this from within the LÖVE app? So there's nothing to install?

This is a story about a hundred lines of code that do it. I'm probably not the first to discover the trick, but I hadn't seen it before and it feels a bit magical.

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wardley.love is a reskin of snap.love for drawing Wardley Maps. I've been using it a lot; here's one example:

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I love reading Kragen Sitaker as an endless fount of surprisingly deep programs and analysis. Lately he's been avoiding the web and writing in a directory of markdown files. He writes so much that he switches directories every year or so (I think of them as volumes), and they're all highly recommended for sifting through during quiet afternoons:

• dercuano
• derctuo
• dernocua

pothi.love is a simple browser for such a directory of files that lets me add comments locally to them. Then I can git commit and git push to publish them.

(The name: 'pothi' is Sanskrit for a sort of loose-leaf book of palm leaves, 'bound' with a single string through a single hole in the middle of each page/leaf.)

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A 15-minute manifesto (video and transcript) on lessons learned trying to build situated software for a year.

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