Conductive Tech

Fri, Mar 10, 2023

When I'm in a hacky mood, there are two situations you're generally likely to find me in: either I'm building something as fast as I can, or I'm trying out something new to figure out if it's going to enable me to build something faster, or in a more fun or interesting way.

I find that there are two main dimensions I care about when trying out new stuff:

Utility

• Does it do something novel
• Fun?
• Fascinating?
• Does it just do something better?

Friction

• How hard it is to get things up and running?
• Am I running into lots of issues?
• How often is it counterintuitive how to accomplish something?
• How's the ergonomics?

Ultimately, the balance of those things determine how conductive the tech is to manifesting ideas. And that's why I figured I'd try to get into the habit of evaluating for myself how conductive tech is, rather than instinctively making decisions based on only one of the dimensions.

Obviously, both those metrics are super subjective, and that's fine because the index is for myself. What is counterintuitive to me might be super obvious to you. I don't think we can or should bother overcoming that.

So, the tech I've run into lately, and how conductive it's felt on a scale from 1 to 10:

Tauri: 6

• Very high utility, slightly high friction.
• The power of calling rust functions in JS and the performance is very cool.
• The documentation and getting-started-templating repo are unaligned, creating a confusing and pretty hands on self-onboarding.
• I have managed to build something not too complex, but found that I couldn't get a lot of things to work easily. Ultimately, my idea is not really moving forward because of the time I know I need to spend making the framework do what I want.

Node-red: 8

• High utility, lowish friction
• Getting from 0 to prototype is absurdly fast
• installation is a breeze
• most of the components are not updated since a long time, and it feels like a lot of obvious features has just never been made
• The documentation for actual usage is OK, but could be more embedded.

Lively Kernel: 3

• Maybe utility, incredibly high friction
• This is totally on me, it's been abandoned since a long time.
• There are a few forks with active development, but docs are missing, and they are still in dev.

Huginn: 3

• The utility seems to be there, but the implementation feels too delicate
• I lost patience before managing to install it on my VPS.
• Tried it locally a bit, but didn't really 'click'.

11ty: 7

• Static site generator that reads markdown. Very easy to set up and have a site build with.
• Not nearly as much cognitive overload as in competition (jekyll, hugo, astro, etc).
• A quick node dev server and build process, flexible templating while easy to get going.
• Public file process (adding filenames to a js file) feels like it could come with sane defaults, like a folder.

Stable Diffusion: 5

• Conflicted. Very high utility, very fragile components.
• Convoluted hard to reproduce python setups makes every environment completely different
• Lots of community solutions focus on web-interfaces. Sometimes kinda works in colab, but local setup mileage may vary.