Knit picks: May 21

Hey news-reading Knitters! First a programming note. No not that programming…

Newsletter stuff

You may start to see Knit picks biweekly going forward. It’s not entirely decided, but if you don’t hear from me next week, fear not; we’ll be back after Memorial Day.

Scheduling is kind of a coarse grained control knob for prioritization. I’ve been wanting to try to dial up my time developing and refining Knit and dial down my advocacy of Knit a little.

Explain stuff

I gave a couple deep dives on Knit. They both basically went the same way:

• Refresh with a quick demo, show some neat features.
• Start pulling on a little thread, like a dependency graph.
  
• 40 minutes later find that we’re still unpacking layers of concepts and implications.
• Take a break to come down from the Knit brain freeze. Still haven’t looked at code.

I forgot how heady Knit can be! The implementation is very compact (roughly 4000 LOC for the CLI + web app), but my-oh-my is it dense. It kind of reminds me of fractal complexity; the underlying formulas are really simple, but the emergent complexity snowballs in layers.

An interesting reaction from both sessions was (paraphrasing), “Knit is a much bigger idea than I thought it was.” That kind of sums up why I’m so excited about it!

Sunny stuff

Ok honestly it is way too nice out and I’m going to get a sunny beer. You should too!