sthielen
Joined 13 years ago
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272
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74
Member since
Mar 20
Recent submissions
Comment · 7 years ago
Thanks! And yeah, I think the timing really feels right for something like this in a way that wasn't the case even a year or so ago.
In addition to the published apps on the discovery side of the platform, we've made a significant investment in tech that enables creators/makers to develop and remix apps in a new way (including spinning up "remote localhost" containers for development; building a collaborative online editor with a unique editing experience that lifts no-code visual abstractions from the underlying code; integrated deploy/CI for both frontends and backends; and other goodies like support for custom domains with automatic HTTPS). This video shows some of that in action [0].
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5uoqPFInlY&feature=youtu.be...
Comment · 7 years ago
Hi everyone, co-founder/lead dev here. We've been working on Koji for the past six months or so, inspired by the idea of democratizing the creation of interactive content (apps, "mini programs", whatever you want to call them) in the same way that YouTube democratized the creation of interactive video. -- we're still in beta and there are lots of rough edges, but it's nonetheless exciting to wake up and see it on here :)
Happy to answer any questions!
PS - My cofounder (https://twitter.com/dmitry) and I met five years ago here on HN!
Comment · 7 years ago
I really appreciate your taking a look and writing all of that up. We're only a month or so into public beta, so a lot of things (mainly on that technical documentation side that you mentioned) are still missing. We've been heavily focused on enabling non-technical people, or very early beginners, to use the platform as creators, so we've been a little hesitant to overwhelm them with technical things that might scare them off or make it seem like this isn't a tool for them. That being said, you're absolutely right that it's a huge piece of this (and arguably the most important piece for a certain audience) and part of a balance we need to find moving forward. If you're curious about the answers to those questions, there's a low-level technical writeup on this page [0] that I'm working on incorporating somewhere into the actual product/landing page.
[0] - https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/koji-web-app-develo...
Comment · 7 years ago
This is awesome! I've been working on something similar with Koji [0], with the added twist of taking templates for full stack (web) apps and cloning remote dev environments + production deployment pipelines alongside the code. It's been especially valuable for more junior devs/people just getting started to be able to "play" and remix an app instead of trying to start building from scratch. Especially when some of them have never even heard the word "repository" before.
There's a lot of interesting stuff that comes when thinking about these kinds of templates from the level of fully-baked products instead of just lower-level components like frameworks and libraries. Excited to see where Github is headed with all of these recent feature releases.
[0] - https://gokoji.com
Comment · 7 years ago
You can count me as another data point. I started taking coding seriously at around 11/12 years old, working on one of the big Runescape fansites, and very quickly lost interest in playing the game because I found coding to be more fun.
I wonder where this is happening today, for the next generation of developers. Roblox seems like a big one, are there others?
Comment · 8 years ago
Agreed. For a less reductive perspective, I've found Emily Feng's reporting for the FT to be informative [0,1,2]. I'd be interested in other reading recommendations, if anyone has them.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/ac0ffb2e-8b36-11e8-b18d-0181731a0...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/721192f4-a1fa-11e8-85da-eeb7a9ce3...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/f0d3223a-7f4d-11e8-bc55-50daf11b7...
Comment · 8 years ago
If you haven't, the 2008 Hugh Aplin translation is worth checking out. I found it made for a bit easier/more casual reading than the sometimes stuffy P/V, which lets the situational humor and the playfulness of the language come through a lot more naturally.
Comment · 8 years ago
Thanks for the heads up :) We leaned into a lot of location-based stuff in the early days (around the time of the Pokemon Go craze)--check these out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd6DjJ0GdBQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCrWYFTDqfU
Comment · 8 years ago
I think the sentiment implicit in your question—that the initial hype wave of AR has cooled off—is valid. I believe one of the biggest reasons we’ve yet to see AR truly succeed on mobile is that it’s prohibitively difficult it is to create AR content right now. You need professional developers and real budgets to create a single AR experience. It’s too costly for businesses/brands/individuals to experiment or try new things, which is why there are only something like 2,000 ARKit apps on the Apple App Store [0]. Given that, it’s not surprising that we haven’t seen any big, behavior-changing hits aside from Pokemon Go and messenger frames.
You might be interested in what we've been working on at Metaverse [1]. The platform we're building allows non-programmers to create interactive content that leverages AR (our beta testers have already created over 30K experiences).
We’ve been at it for about a year and a half now and are still in beta, but it's being used by marketers, teachers, record labels, etc. [2] These people don’t know how to code (most of them don’t even know what ARKit is). They’re ordinary people [3] who now have access to a powerful tool that lets them try new things, play with new patterns, and leverage otherwise-inaccessible technologies to solve their own problems.
The long tail of Youtube brought us unboxing videos, Twitch, and Justin Bieber; we want to see what AR (and software, generally) begins to look like when ordinary people have the power to create. I think that's where the really cool stuff is going to be. Check out our Twitter account to see some of the awesome things people are making: https://twitter.com/metaverseapp
--
[0] https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/02/this-is-tim-transcript-of...
Comment · 9 years ago
I think there is a balance to be found between "pinkifying" and "de-blueing" (to wrangle an inversion out of that word). Many of these early education coding platforms use "play" to introduce fundamentals and concepts to kids. They're not intended as formal platforms for computer science education; they want to let kids do cool things and get excited about programming and possibly ramp up into that more formal programming education.
Letting kids manipulate characters from properties to which they've already been exposed is a good way of creating that initial interest. The issue is that assets like Minecraft Steve, or R2D2, or things like that, while obviously loved by no shortage of girls, are still primarily marketed toward boys. Until we can effectively move that needle at a higher, more societal level, I think it's valuable to incorporate media properties targeted toward girls into these kinds of platforms simply in order to engender that initial interest. A kid (regardless of gender) who loves BB8 should be able to use their learn-to-code-platform-of-choice to make BB8 run in a circle. A kid (again, regardless of gender) who loves American Girl should be able to use that same platform to make Julie say something funny.
My company has been doing some work with the Girl Scouts, teaching girls to build games and apps in Augmented Reality, and while the interface/platform itself is sterile and professional (& obviously if you think theming an IDE pink will help "appeal to women," this is an issue), the girls naturally gravitate to characters and assets from the properties to which they are already exposed and are already fans. This includes everything from Minecraft Steve, to Spongebob, to lolcats (which are, apparently, still a thing) to Elsa, and Barbie.
sean [at] mindstudio [dot] ai