devlog

For the last couple of years worth of my software art and semantic web experiments, i tried to keep an at least semi-occasional journal of what i was making. A lot of my work accumulated on my hard drive, sketched out in bursts of inspiration, and never really launched or reified. The journal at least provided a reference point for me, of where i had been, and how that influenced where i ended up.

I spent a few months experiencing Hacker Burnout in a serious way. I had been caught up in the magic of code, the poetry of code for many years, never really stopping, data structures infecting and reforming my dreams; to find myself feeling physically unable to write code for a while was mortifying to me.

There’s been more than one upside, though. Stop Coding followed a very distinct “this is done enough” feeling that i received, about a whole collection of concepts, implementations and related ideas that i had been struggling to get out into the world since they all entered my head more or less simultaneously, during the summer of 2002. With the last iteration, i felt that i’d built what i wanted to. My non-code-related notebooks also seemed to complete a cycle of collaborative mapping, collaborative planning; groundwork laid, perspective needed to take a smaller core of this work into another dimension.

Now that i can face looking at where i was again, i’m a bit aghast at how much i overfocused on production, and underfocused on explanation. I would say that i had a driving philosophy with a lot of this work, but wasn’t articulating it in a language than non-software-hackers could understand, other than in person.

I see similar visions around, in fragments or in near-complete forms, and i’m interested in talking about those, and using that as a springboard for talking more about what i was trying to achieve, rather than how i was trying to achieve it, over three years of hacking on collaborative mapping / lightweight knowledge representation / organisational hypercommunication / wireless networking tools.

For the really curious, consumotronic turned out to be the motherlode of what i was trying to express; a big python port, reworking, expansion of a lot of perl prototypes i had made.