jjarvis

I have been thinking quite a bit about this lately. I am in the process of building my own music software applications. This is actually allowing me to leave MacOS since Ableton was previously the anchor for me. I can now build tools that are more geared towards what I always wanted in Rust much like DHH was talking about in that talk.

I could sell some of my tools I built but I am on the fence about it. As a few others have said, there is still work and taste that goes into those tools that some might not want to put the effort into. However, there will be an increasing number of people who just build bespoke tools for themselves. That's probably ok. There's a market for both.

The most important thing now (and maybe always) is distribution. If anyone can build something then it ultimately comes down to your ability to market, build trust and provide support at 2:30 AM. That's hard to do when you're a one person shop. Software is an ongoing operational commitment if you make it your business.

Max/Msp supports node.js. This would be very useful in a max patch.

Ableton used Max’s RNBO library for these pages. RNBO is essentially Max but compiles to web assembly. https://rnbo.cycling74.com/explore/learning-synths-and-rnbo

I like this idea too.

I would also propose taking it in the direction of generating synthesizer parameters for a popular VST or Hardware synth instrument. As a musician, it would be very nice to be able to program a synthesizer through plain text as a starting point.

I like Future of Coding. The show combines interviews with paper reads. One of my favorite interviews was with Miller Puckette who created Pure Data and the original version of the Max/MSP software.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/future-of-coding/id126...

I also enjoy the Tech Won't Save Us Podcast. This podcast takes a much needed critical take of tech and SV culture. I feel like this is what tech journalism should be as opposed to the usual cheer leading we usually see.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-wont-save-us/id15...

Nice! I expect to see more applications like this with the introduction of Max's RNBO library a few weeks back.

This aesthetic will pass one day.

I think that the current minimal aesthetic really started in the early 00's with Apple's iPod. That design was striking at the time and was the antithesis to 90's grunge aesthetic. I was also a big fan of minimal techno back then and I almost felt like Apple was making nods to that lifestyle. We were certainly using their computers to produce it!

Now minimalism is old hat. I suspect that Gen Z will make some minor statements against it. But the big disruption won't come for another generation.

I recently read Generations by Neil Howe and William Strauss. In the book they make the case that their are 4 archetypes to a generation cycle - Idealist (boomer), Reactive (gen x), Civic (millennial) and Adaptive (gen z). Idealists and Civics are the dominant generations. While Reactive and Adaptive are the less so (one reacts against and the other codifies).

We will soon repeat the cycle sometime in the 2030's. The generation following gen z will be an idealist generation and will disrupt the current "blanding" trends we are living with. Think about the last time this happened. In the 1950s the silent generation (the last cycle's adaptive generation) was coming of age in an extremely conformist era created by the GI Generation (civics). Then the boomers came to age and the 1960s happened.

This! I am fortunate enough to belong to a small team which has mostly adopted Basecamp's "shape up" method and it has been a breath of fresh air.

I think the biggest game changer is the notion of using the "appetite" (number of weeks per cycle) to drive the design of the solution. This is opposed to the usual approach of coming up with a solution and then estimating the points/time it will take to do each part of the project. SE's are bad estimators and the product manager rarely uses time as a design constraint. This is why most projects run past their deadlines IMO.

I would love to see a reboot of Byte Magazine even if it only came back in digital form.