Interjected Future

Lab notes #020 useDb and Embodied

This week the todo list is coming along. The app works like a regular todo list. There's no server, and yet it persists the data between reloads. I wanted to see how it would feel to have a database as the state management library. Instead of having an app state

Lab Note #019 Local-first Data Model

I'm making progress with the todo list. While I can only add tasks right now, it persists the data without a server and can sync between different open tabs (within the same browser). I've built my share of web apps before, yet I've never built a local-first app. It does

lab notes

Lab notes #018 Changes

The couple of months have been full of changes. It was actually a good time to write down the process, but unfortunately, things changed so quickly that I didn't get a chance to process it all in writing. This is an outline from since the last time. A couple of

ai-assist

AI-assist: Generating a histogram of all commits over time

What would I use to generate a histogram of all the commits over time?To generate a histogram of commits over time, you can use Git's built-in git log command in combination with a tool like awk, sort, and uniq. Here's an example command that you can run in your

programming

Information-rich Cache

I was surprised to learn that different stacks of software all do some type of computational analysis to better do its job. The CPU does it to figure out how to pipeline instructions. Compilers do it to feed CPUs better set of instructions. Front-end frameworks do it to figure out

Lab notes #017 Surveying Local-first Real-time Databases / Frameworks

One major thing I did in the last two weeks was to take a step back and review the current landscape of real-time databases and syncing frameworks. In my last essay, I came to the conclusion that for app architectures that want to retain state on the client side, we

programming

Imagining a sample TodoMVC with an immutable database

As an exercise to see what the developer experience might look like, I outlined what it might look like for a React-like single-page app. The app that's outlined below is a variation on the TodoMVC.

lab notes

Lab notes #016 Computing deployed for operational efficiency

For any endeavor, there are two ends you can work on: deep technical work and finding the market. This past week was mostly spent on the latter. One of my unfair advantages is access to Bookface, where founders detail problems they face. Searching for posts on "no-code" or "internal tools"

programming

The state management library front-ends are looking for is a database

State is a cross-cutting concern. Weak equivalence hinders re-rendering. Distance between code and data breeds complexity. State transitions need linear traces.

lab notes

Lab notes #015 Writing about state management

This past week was spent researching and reminding myself of the core problems of building interactive apps and addressing state management problems. React I Love You, but You're Bringing Me DownGet in Zoomer, We're saving ReactThe new wave of React state managementWhy React Context is Not a "State Management" Tool

lab notes

Lab notes #014 Revisiting Requirements

The persistent data structure in Datomic is used as a live index for querying. However, it's unique in that it saves itself to a storage-backed key/value store in segments–continuous pieces of data akin to the data in the leaf nodes of a trie. By fetching a key/value

lab notes

Lab notes #013 Inserting keys beyond capacity

Spent the week fixing issues with insertion, mostly with different edge cases. Was able to solve an issue with inserting at the beginning and the end of the trie. The edge case was that take_left and take_right should take into account when we take everything or take nothing.

lab notes

Lab notes #012 taking right and left and the case of the weird iterator

After the iteration over values was done, it was quick work to write tests for concatenation and make sure that it was working correctly. Then the time thereafter was some cleanup and moving stuff out to their own files. The work this week to implement take_right and take_left,

Persistent Data Structure Redux

This is a review of all the resources I found and learned about persistent data structures in the course of looking for a solution for maintaining state. Complexity from maintaining stateOne of the hard things about programming is how to maintain and manage state, especially at scale. In interactive programs,

lab notes

Lab notes #011 value iteration and the LLM assistance problem

This week was a little different. The implementation work was supposed to be fairly trivial, but in practice, it took a lot of time. The implementation was for an iterator that iterates over all the values in the RRBT in order. In theory, it's pretty trivial. The core concept is

lab notes

Lab notes #010 4th time's the charm to rewrite append

Most of this week has been spent rewriting `append()`. This stemmed from mostly following the pseudocode from the L'Orange paper too closely. Excited about ChatGPT, I used it to convert the pseudocode to Rust code and tried to go from there. However, in the end, I found that it was

lab notes

Lab notes #009 Concatenation and Append

Took a bit of a break, but have been back at it. The most involved part of implementing the relaxed radix balance trie is the concatenation. I had to consult three different papers to piece together what the details were, but in the end, I found L'Orange's paper to be

lab notes

Lab notes #008 Details are in the ID

I'm usually not hung up about the programming language I use, but given Jamie's take, I did some deliberation about whether to use Zig or Rust. I ended up going with Rust, because I'm not a seasoned systems programmer, so I figured having the compiler guide me to writing safe

lab notes

Lab notes #007 Reuse not possible

While moving forward through the implementation, it wasn't clear how the indexing worked in detail. How do you determine what segments were different between the live and storage-backed indices? By definition, aren't all segments in the live index novel? But more worryingly, what is the key used to store the

lab notes

Lab notes #006 Categories redux

A good part of the week was spent reading and watching talks on "The simple essence of automatic differentiation". I got the gist the first go around but much of the details were opaque to me. Reading it this second time around and actually working through the examples helped with

lab notes

Lab notes #005 Moving on from the low level

Reading more papers, mostly focused on Relaxed Radix Balanced Trees, since other trees, such as B-trees, Finger Trees, and HAMT trees seem to predate the research on this one. The premise is generally pretty simple, but the devil is in the details. The papers on it are fairly clear. I

lab notes

Lab notes #004 Index construction with trees

Watched lectures and read papers on persistent trees, and come away feeling like it's a rabbit hole. I initially found it difficult to implement a B+-tree in Rust, due to ownership rules, so I stopped. As much of an advantage it would be to have these things implemented, it's a commodity.

Lab notes #003 Database as Value in Depth

lab notes

Lab Notes #002 Found embedded database

For the programming environment, I wanted a database embedded in it. I had stuided the architecture of Datomic, and it seems a convincing architecture to solve the problem of creating offline apps distributed online. However, Datomic is proprietary, and there isn't an official corresponding client side database either. I'm hesitant

programming

Compiling Composable Reactivity

What if the changes to the input result in state changes that can't be computed fast enough to keep the user interface snappy for an interactive program? Reactivity to the rescue. It's a way to drastically reduce the amount of computation required to compute an output given a change to the input.