(2023-08-23) Taylor Dog Days

Dorian Taylor: Dog Days. The Summer of Protocols, which started in May, is close to ending its run. We spent the last week of July at a retreat just outside Seattle, mainly partaking in meet-and-greet exercises and collaboration sessions, as well as a focus on an ur-product that encapsulates the entire program, and the impact we want it to have.

I think the clearest take-home I got from my experience at the retreat was that nobody understood what the heck I’m working on. I was hoping to have a fully-assembled prototype in time for the retreat, and that way I could just show people instead of trying to hand-wave about it, but I had only just dreamt up the final design a couple weeks earlier—​that, and an all-too-welcome name change

frame up the fact that my “protocol artifact”, as we’re calling them, has not one or two, but five distinct constituencies. Each has different (and not always overlapping) interests, goals, skills, and values.

This half-hour video is the result of the last two weeks’ work. It is arguably 25 minutes too long, but I didn’t have time to make a shorter one.

off, the name: Intertwingler. I like it. Cheeky yet entirely appropriate on a number of levels. The old name, RDF::SAK - for Resource Description Framework (RDF) Swiss Army Knife - just told you what it was.

I spend 23 minutes of this video talking about concrete objectives I was trying to achieve but couldn’t, because Intertwingler doesn’t exist yet

I use org-mode and write the script as bullet points. I find it easier to read back that way.

The plan is to triangulate this video back to a new text that will ultimately be my essay, one half of my Summer of Protocols deliverables. This video will be its companion.

it’ll be lamentable if I put all this effort into making a thing that nobody ends up using

My original plan was to bang off the refactor of what was then still called RDF::SAK, and then spend the rest of the summer doing advocacy for what would be a serviceable product. I definitely underestimated the overhead of simply participating in the program, which in retrospect I would place at about 25% of the total available hours.

the task of physically writing the artifact is dwarfed by that of determining what to write. Such has been the experience of writing Intertwingler - there’s almost nothing to it, but the part of it that isn’t nothing has turned out to be extraordinarily elusive to articulate.

I’ve roughed in the skeleton for the design I’m ultimately shipping, and going to spend the next week doing nothing but work on it. We’re kind of at the point where two or three solid coding binges will push it into the zone where other people can use it. See you on August 31.

The Nature of Software still lives. I utterly failed to broadcast the fact that I had shipped chapter 7 of The Nature of Software: Local Symmetries several weeks ago.

What is on the horizon for The Nature of Software, as I mention in the video, is a complete subsumption into the Intertwingler engine. Or rather, I should say, it’s already in there, but it’s static, and there are some things I want to do to it - like enable subscribers to annotate the chapters - that require a live engine running. So best I concentrate on getting said engine working.