Lol yeah there's lots of ways to do this - and I'm sure I'm breaking a bunch of formal web design rules. But eh, this figma workflow is easy and fun :)
I love this writeup! I'm not a developer but am very interested in "small databases" on the web - there was a good discussion around my post on this on HN last week. The magic of small databases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558054
Hey OP here, just wanted to say thanks for all the comments (goats and all). There's lots I still need to learn about (actual) databases as a hobby developer...
In the meantime I've made a big update to the Airtable with links to tools, examples and further reading:
"We propose that web sites can be similarly augmented with other sophisticated data-centric functionality, giving users new benefits over the existing Web." - gonna check this paper out!
Some use cases that I'm already using it for even in the limited state:
* Making topic-focused lists of articles. e.g. researching a particular topic just grab a bunch of URLs and stick them in a table
* Real estate research - grabbing a bunch of locations and adding them to a table, but where price and image are auto-
grabbed (and adding notes)
* Making a list of gift ideas
* Making a running list of music I want to check out
These are mostly simple bookmarking use cases.
What I *really* want to be able to do is publish these lists (either as HTML or as JSON endpoints) and collaborate on them with others! But that requires building a server and login etc that all feels a bit beyond my coding skills.....
I'm not entirely sure that Electric Tables is quite so grandiose as all that but I appreciate the sentiment!
As for CSP - I'm not technical enough to really understand why it needs to exist or how it might be re-architected but as a hobby coder I love it when things are extensible / hackable and CSP seems to be a pain in the ass!
So I fire up the terminal and write echo $PATH and then go back to SO to see that it looks like it's all set up correctly. But why do I need to go to SO? Why do I need to fire up the terminal? It just feels too damn hard and too opaque.
I think defaults and documentation and onboarding matter. Not to mention a GUI :)
Mentioned Glitch and Replit in the article - they're great and I love them but there's still something missing about relying on these platforms imho. I think cementing a default coding environment right into the browser would make it a lot more accessible - and actually be much closer to real coding where you're manipulating files and running code.
Plus: glitch/replit are quite slow to do any real coding inside of vs developing locally.
But maybe the future really is in the browser in this way.
Yeah I love Replit and Glitch (not used the others) but I still think there's something missing. They don't feel like standards that are easy and simple to use. Two more points:
Secondly - I wish I could get ScrollToTextFragment to work reliably. I've tried integrating this into Quotebacks and every time it just works so sporadically that I roll it back. Somehow Google thinks this is robust and stable enough to put into production but my experience is very hit/miss.
Author here - thanks for all the comments and feedback. Lovely surprise to wake up to this on the HN homepage.
Some light additional context - this is part of my ongoing series "The Strategic Independent" which will eventually become a book sometime next year. All the posts in that series are catalogued here: https://www.are.na/tom-critchlow/the-strategic-independent
This post (and the whole series) is designed for independent consultants, free-agents and freelancers who have to navigate entering and exiting client environments often faster than full-time employees. Hopefully there's something useful in that context but many of these ideas could be applicable beyond that also.
Anyway - thanks for the love. If you have topic suggestions for future posts in this series would love to hear them! Thanks, Tom.
Author here: yes I have an email list here (infrequent) that I'll post a message to once chapters 3 and 4 are ready: https://tinyletter.com/tomcritchlow
Author here - Yes I would definitely recommend reading Impro over reading my blog post.
The basic premise for this series is inspired by the book and I definitely borrow more directly and heavily for chapters 3 and 4 (which aren't quite ready to publish yet!).
Author here - yeah I hear you. I love the hypothesis interactions when they happen on my site but the UI is a little aggressive (especially on mobile). All about tradeoffs unfortunately.