Presented by

  • Katie Bell

    Katie Bell
    @notsolonecoder
    https://katiebell.net/

    Katie has been a professional developer for more than 10 years, jumping through ecosystems from a giant Java-writing company (Google) to a tiny Python-based company (Grok Learning) to a Microsoft and .NET company (Campaign Monitor). She's also worked and volunteered in education and helped a lot of rookie coders pull together their first hello world programs, websites and larger projects.

Abstract

I confess, I hate writing code in text files. I hate dealing with syntax errors, carefully matching brackets, style rules, line-by-line git diffs and tiny character-specific cursor movements. That's why I set out on an epic quest to build a coding interface with no bracket matching, no syntax errors and no whitespace — but it still has to be fast to edit, keyboard controlled and can't sprawl spaghetti lines across the screen. Not possible you say? Well you might be right, but I'm damn well going to try. Over the last year I've built a series of mocks and prototypes and every one of them has taught me something fascinating as I slowly grow closer to the goal. Join me on my exploration of what code even is and how human language influences how we think about code.