readme

Author: jaspertravers

README.org

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 #+TITLE: Workshop
 #+AUTHOR: Jasper Travers
 
+  Workshop is a canvas based end user programming environment. It allows the user to create boxes of either [[https://codemirror.net/6/][CodeMirror]] or [[https://prosemirror.net/][ProseMirror]] editors and manipulate them on an artboard style canvas. The live demo demonstrates a mouse tracking widget as well as tabbed workspaces both of which are coded within the environment itself. Workshop is a rought prototype of a self-hosted end user programming environment in the web. In other words, it is a small application intended to provide the minimum functionality to allow the user to extend it with features as they see fit, during the use of the application. It's "primitives" in this sense are the CodeMirror and ProseMirror editors along with mouse events to control them.
+
+** Backstory
+
 This project is the third part in a multiyear exploration of programming tools. I have parallel pursuits at different levels of the stack focusing on OS interactions (tiling wms) and programmer ergonomics (fliesystem watchers), here we will focus on what I like to think of broadly as "digital" tools. These projects have grown into the domain of the digital medium and involve collaboration, media and computation. The ultimate problem of the digital medium is of context. How are things accessed and related? How are static assets and compute made available? How are many more than one screen's worth of content displayed on one screen, or three screens? Human computer interaction design is the practice of unifying information architecture with an invisible periphery structure through which a human navigates a simulation interface.
 
 The first part was the result of an interaction design class project about education. We set out to study and improve computer science class lectures. The design we found was a dual editor live coding environment. We positioned instructor code alongside a local environment on each students laptop such that they could run class code in the instruction environment as well as modify, test and ask questions of a local environment simultaneously. The project mostly focused on the domain of large lectures, but also found relevance in small coding groups as well as pair programming. It was validating, a year later, to see Atom and VSCode simultaneously release pair programming tooling.