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Geoffrey Litt: Dynamic Documents as Personal Software

Recurse Center

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Localhost is a series of public technical talks in NYC given by members of the Recurse Center community.

📑 Geoffrey Litt on Dynamic Documents

We usually think of "documents" and "applications" as different concepts. But what if we could make dynamic documents that combine the simplicity of documents with the power of applications, empowering more people to craft their own personal and malleable software?

Geoffrey has been exploring this theme since he attended the Recurse Center eight years ago. In this talk, he shares some things he's learned along the way, including lessons from historical systems like Hypercard, demos of research prototypes like the Embark dynamic travel planner that they developed at the Ink & Switch lab, as well as a sneak peek at some of the latest experiments they're trying at Notion.

Geoffrey Litt is a software designer and researcher that works on malleable software and methods for AI-assisted programming. He specializes in designing and prototyping environments for thinking.

He currently works at Notion. Previously, he was a senior researcher at Ink & Switch, did a PhD in HCI at MIT, and did design and engineering at startups. He attended the Recurse Center in 2018.

Read more:

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/

https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/ma...

https://www.inkandswitch.com/embark/

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The Recurse Center is a self-directed retreat for curious programmers. People travel from around the world to spend 6 or 12 weeks coding together in our two-floor space in Brooklyn.

Learn more about RC: https://www.recurse.com/

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Apply: https://www.recurse.com/apply

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00:00 How to Take a Rabbit Hole Very Seriously
05:04 Bringing Code to Life
16:41 Personal Software
28:35 Deploying at Scale
39:17 Takeaways
41:04 Q&A

20 Comments

@zmef42 2 weeks ago

i feel like the concepts he is talking about is one of the reasons Jupiter Notebooks is such a great way to lean python

@mehedihassanome4688 1 day ago

I am an Obsidian user, and I am feeling a little jealous of Notion. This is so awesome!!

@mmm999aaa 3 weeks ago

This video makes me way too excited. There were so many little bits of “YES! I’ve wanted this but couldn’t quite crystallize my thought around it” throughout this whole video, it’s absurd.

@wilbermunn9532 3 weeks ago

This feels like literate programming for the lifestyle space, love it

@paultal 3 weeks ago

Where are my fellow Obsidian users at?

@Dot-Rose 2 weeks ago

This is fantastic. I’ve been amazed recently at how friends of mine who are devs at google and microsoft were unaware of Emacs, which is very conducive to the sorts of workflows you demonstrate here. I hope that your work brings awareness of this kind of functionality to a large audience!

@danibee535 2 weeks ago

26:24 Fantastic work. I’ve had an anti-“app” rant that I’ve subjected people to for a while now that’s very much of the same bent. But you’ve actually done the work to develop something, and looks great. I really think companies like Apple have dropped the ball in exploring stuff like this - to make it work really well you need APIs and platforms that come best from a platform provider.

@johnsoncyfung 3 weeks ago

Ah this is awesome! This reminds of a feature in Antinote where you can build JS extensions and execute them in the note. The ends up being some hybrid between a shell and a document.

@paoloanzani 11 days ago (edited)

As a "power-user" of Notion and software developer, this is GOLD, i feel almost guilty watching this for free fr

@mburgerr 2 weeks ago

havent heard about ruby since 2019, this video is super cool

@simrandalvi8437 3 weeks ago

all i thought through out the video was..."Wow! that's so cool!! how did u make that. give me the technical details too ! Peassseeee!!!"

@amzp_learn 13 days ago

Very interesting talk, it’s always good to rethink our paradigms.
I remember when the android/ios app boom was happening, i was in college and everyone was using those interactive textbook apps for chemistry and biology. Many professors wanted to create similar content but making an app was too difficult, I can definitely see the value in making this easily available.

@sebas11tian 2 weeks ago

It's so close to what I also naturally started doing with a skill to generate explanations using htmx templates

@KadirAnsari-w3u 12 days ago

Thanks for sharing your creativity.

@pankajrajpoot5485 2 weeks ago

This made my day.

@berndeckenfels 4 weeks ago (edited)

Back to OLE, DCOM, Beans or Som/opendoc.
The question is how,it can view or link objects from Applications which don’t Cooperate. (Short of iframes)

@gabriel99201 2 weeks ago

OMG! That's awesome!!!

@JEVanClief 1 day ago (edited)

Files and folders are all you need ✌️ although I will say by the time you get to dynamic documents I think markdown language handles most of this paired with scripts as you need them. Pair that with some connectors /plugins it's already been solved just needs the domain packages to make it scaled