Justin Review 2

home, looking at data

~ April 13, 2025 ~

This is the second issue of Justin Review.

I discuss visiting home, “flow coding”, and a potential Justin garage sale.

Visiting Home

This past week I went back to visit my parents. It was fun to take a break from NYC.

Some things I noticed

  • I’ve found that I habitually want to go on walks much more after having lived in a walkable city for over a year
  • Warm weather feels great after being deprived of it for months
  • Southern hospitality (as always)
  • I’m getting better at reading road signs on large interstate highways
  • Quietness gives you room to think

I will likely return home for a more extended duration at the end of this year.

Flow Coding

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

  • Frank Herbert, Dune

https://www.are.na/block/35640655

I’ve been interested lately about software systems that allow the user to “move with the flow of the process”. Common traits include: live visualization of code, moldable tool development, and being able to directly interact with the system.

“Flow coding” is a form of coding where you can directly interact with the live system.

Here are a list of what I think represent different aspects of flow coding:

  • Glamorous Toolkit - allows making “micro-tools” to explore software systems, based on smalltalk environments
  • Moldable Development - manifesto related to Glamorous Toolkit
  • Splunk, Signalfx, Datadog, etc. - modern SAAS observability tools are the current mainstream way we have visibility into large software systems
  • Clojure REPL - “a programming environment which enables the programmer to interact with a running Clojure program and modify it, by evaluating one code expression at a time.”
  • Chrome Devtools - amazing tools for web development. The tools here to interact with HTML/CSS are surprisingly deep, and I think anyone learning frontend should start by using these tools
  • Figma - visual creation for designing (to me a visual HTML/CSS interface)
  • Datasette - tool for exploring and publishing data, based on sqlite
  • Rust “compiler driven development” - have fast, fine-grained interactions with Rust code while inside your text editor
  • Media for Thinking the Unthinkable - (MUST WATCH!!!) Bret Victor lecture with many cool demos

Flow coding is where I hope the programming community moves forward to. It is a powerful next step away from our current “pencil-and-paper” style programming paradigm, where we lack tools to directly interact with the entire system.

This is in stark contrast with the recent trend of vibe coding where the programmer loses understanding and control of the system they are programming. Here the programmer relies on an indeterministic, lossy process of relying on language models rather than actually learning how the system works.

Vibe coding is not something I hope the programming communities continues adopting. It is a lossy process in which the programmer loses understanding of the system they develop. I’ve seen comparisons of the usage of language models to the industrial revolution, where language models in programming are deemed as Henry Ford’s Model T removing the need for horses. I think this is a false analogy as vibe coding isn’t an actual paradigm shift.

To me, vibe coding is like injecting your horse with steroids.

Flow coding is like driving the first car.

Justin Garage Sale

I plan on moving out of NYC at the end of this year for a few months to escape the winter. It’s very cold and dark and I don’t like that the sun sets at 5pm.

Thus, I want to get rid of as many of my material items here as possible.

However, I don’t want to go about the traditional means of selling/donating items. The idea of selling on Facebook Marketplace urks me for multiple reasons: I don’t want to interact with strangers, it seems like a hassle to have to respond to multiple potential buyers/schedule meetings, and I don’t want to support Facebook. I’m not opposed to donating items but I’d rather this be a later option for items I don’t manage to sell.

I want to have more of a “Garage Sale” style website where I list items I own that people I know IRL/have mutual friends with can purchase. I want to sell these at a steep discount, lower than what I would sell them for on Facebook Marketplace.

I think this will be fun for multiple reasons

  1. Reduce clutter
  2. Interact with friends
  3. Create fun website

I will announce later when the shop is up, probably on shop.justinliang.me