TODEPOND TIMES: The State of Signals

It's here! The weekly...

📡🐦 TODEPOND TIMES 📡🐦

What's new this week?

State

Hey! I've been working hard on coding things for the next video, which will be called 🎵 Arrows in Arrows in Arrows. To prepare for this, I've been making some more tools.

I'm building an engine that will let you make music with cellular automata. And for this to work, I need to show the user various different things on the screen.

Some of those things can be drawn by me. For example... there will be a whole lot of lines, grids, and arrows.

But these will need to be shown alongside various different user interface-y things too! Such as... sliders, text inputs, and audio stuff.

To make all of these things work well together, I need to keep track of their current state. For example... what's currently inside the text box? Or... where has the user left the slider?

In things like CellPond, I handled all of this manually. And it was very messy. All of the 'state' of the different drag-and-droppable things needed to always be in sync with each other. For example, the rules of the simulation needed to match up with what was displayed on the rule paddles.

I did this by hand! They weren't linked in any way.

There are lots of different ways of dealing with 'state', such as frameworks like React or Svelte. These are incredibly powerful and helpful!

But for my hobby projects, I like to keep things simpler. And part of the fun/flex is to do things myself! So...

In case you didn't know, there's this thing called 'signals' that people in the web development world are getting excited/annoyed/happy/angry/sad/emotional about.

Basically, signals help you manage 'state'. You can keep state synchronised. And you can 'do stuff' when it changes.

So I've added some basic signals to my library - my little toolbox called Habitat! They're gonna help a lot.

Ribbit Report

After the ⚡ Spellular Automata video, I did a couple of talks about it, entitled the Spatial Programming Pipe Dream.

I never planned to do these talks.

But it ended up being really nice to share my work in a different format! And people were very kind about it afterwards.

So I couldn't help but think of what an 'accompanying talk' would be for ☁️ Define Define, my more recent video.

I don't think I'll ever actually do the hypothetical talk, because the video's just... such a strange one. But I thought - I could at least do a little blog post about it!

I've been writing and re-writing a blog post called...
Definitions That Don't Matter (and Some That Do)

In the post, I expand just a little bit more on some themes from the video. And like the previous talk, I delve into my personal life-experience that led to it.

It's just a little-something that I enjoy writing up on my commute! But I've been spending a lot of time on it.

What I'm finding hard is: I don't want to say too much. From the feedback I get... People seem to enjoy the mystery and confusion behind my videos. I don't want to ruin that by eliminating all confusion. I'm currently working on making the blog post even more confusing to help with this!

Anyway, I'll keep you updated with the new video and the new post! Thanks again SO MUCH for supporting me and my projects. I'm really glad that you seem to enjoy them. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you have a great week! See you next time... 📡🐦

Days since tode fell asleep: 58