A brand new blog
05 May 2014 - Rob Attorri
In April 2012, Chris wrote a post on his personal blog entited “Light Table - a new IDE concept”, which turned out to be a pretty neat idea and resulted in a successful Kickstarter campaign and an invitation to join Y Combinator. Two years have passed, Light Table became open source eariler this year, our users have provided some phenomenal work to the project, and the community around it is thriving. Just the other week, we polished up the Light Table home page, but until now, Chris’ blog has been home to all of our release posts and updates. I’m pleased to announce our very own shiny and new Light Table blog. While this is not the most dramatic announcement we’ve ever made, I think it’s important for a few key reasons.
The very first is transparency. We recently had someone take to the discussion group, asking what our project plan was, our timeline for the v1.0 release, what the expected features would be, and so on. The answer was that we’ve been quieter lately because we’ve been heads down figuring out what the future of our business is going to be. For now, that means dedicating much of our attention to our project we initially dubbed Aurora (which is getting renamed) since we believe it’s the best path toward sustaining the company, as well as the logical progression for the work we’ve done so far. Light Table was a wonderful step in improving the feedback loop we wanted in our coding experience, but we started considering what it would actually mean to make programming itself better. We began sharing that thought process with Chris’ latest post, “Toward a better programming”, and from now on, you will see far more frequent updates in that vein. As Adam Savage so deftly reminded us, good science lies in writing it down.
The second is the community. As Light Table is open source, we want the roadmap for it to become what you all think it ought to be. In order to facilitate that, we’ll be sharing what improvements we’re working on and any important happenings in the community. For the time being, there are some improvements to make on the core API before v1.0 drops, to ensure a solid foundation so that future development can be focused less on core commits and more on plugins. Hopefully we’ll have someone giving this attention for the upcoming Google Summer of Code, but I’ll let Jamie tell you more about that since that’s his bag.
The third is familiarity. All of you know Chris, and who wouldn’t want to? But Chris can’t write everything, or at least we won’t let him, since we make sure he takes breaks to sleep and eat. Some of you may have seen various messages from me on the discussion list, but for the rest of you that haven’t the foggiest who I am, please allow me to introduce myself! My name is Rob. I’m Chris’ cofounder and, for lack of more precise labels, the COO around here. As most of our posts have been technical in nature, I’ve been relatively quiet, but as we begin to share more about our direction, vision, and general ideas, you’ll start to hear from me more often. You’ll also get to know our other guy, Jamie, in due course. He is our resident Brit and mathematical savant. The plan is to rotate between Chris, Jamie, and myself to write a blog post each week so that you can get some different perspectives on what’s going on. And who knows, maybe one day Jamie and I will be as popular as Chris is on Hacker News.
So that’s the plan. As we settle into this new weekly blog routine, please feel free to send us any feedback and suggestions, or even specific questions you might have so that we can make sure our posts are relevant to you. For those who are unaware of its existence, there’s always a lot happening on the Light Table discussion group - here’s where you can join if you’re so inclined. One last fun bit of news is that we finally secured @lighttable on Twitter, which had previously been parked with an inactive account and was finally turned over to us last week. While Chris will assuredly remain active on Twitter too, @lighttable will be used from now on for any official announcements and discussion, and potentially for selfies and pictures of our food, since that seems to be the prevailing trend these days. We hope you like all of these communicative developments, and we look forward to talking with you more.
-Rob