sacha chua living an awesome life

John Wiegley and I had lots of fun brainstorming ways to help move Emacs forward, particularly as I’m carving out more of my time to focus on Emacs. Here’s what we talked about:

A rough outline of things to flesh out into articles/chapters:

• productivity, org-mode
• development
  • emacs lisp
  • haskel, rails, java, and other languages…
• writing
• e-mail
• IRC/Twitter/FB
• web
• games and diversions
• documentation
• learning and discovery

Learning Emacs development:

• tools
• cons cells
• macros, quoting
• control structures
• Emacs structures: windows, buffers, text properties, etc.
• lambdas
• libraries

Ideas for visualizations:

• #emacs word cloud or URL frequency/analysis
• IUseThis for Emacs, maybe with annotations

Cookbook:

• PLEAC for Emacs? Emacs Lisp cookbook?
• Coding patterns

IDE challenges:

• IntelliSense
• Excellent project browsing
• Refactoring
• Integrated test harnesses
• Asynchronous operation
• Performance (especially of code analysis and navigation tools)

Target communities/audiences?

• Emacs beginners: getting more into Emacs, learning more about packages, customizing Emacs; learning path through packages, maybe with time estimates?
• Emacs intermediate: tweaking Emacs, getting into Emacs Lisp, contributing upstream; need to update Writing GNU Emacs Extensions
• Keyboard enthusiasts: keyboard shortcuts, customizability
• Non-developers (writers, scientists, mathematicians, etc.): Context-specific functionality, starter kits, easy installs, articles, screencasts – learn from Aquamacs, Ready Lisp. Pre-built Org starter kits? screencasts, interactive tutorials, games as introductions
• Users of defunct editors: migrated features, migration guides
• IDE users: integration with other parts of life
• Vim users: configurability envy, migration/emulation

Emacs performance: elp, memory-use-counts, garbage collection, algorithms, cookbook, core work

Discovery:

• packages: popularity, reverse dependency graph, URL log for #emacs, 24 packages for Christmas and other blog series, IUseThis, reminders to be lazier / stories for inspiration
• EmacsWiki: guided tour, CSS design

Imagining awesomeness in 5 years: Responsive editor that’s easy to set up; SEO so that people can find useful resources; context/goal-specific documentation; regular virtual show&tell

Imagining nonawesomeness: Weak async; marginal/niche; people moving away to other editors because of growing gaps; performance issues; unmaintained code; developer burnout

EmacsConf: mailing list for next year, venue?

Here’s what I’m looking forward to devoting some of my time to:

Write and draw

• EmacsWiki page updates
• Guided tours
• Emacs Lisp cookbook
• Package reviews
• Interviews with people so that they can share their tips (incl. screencast and transcript)

Analyze

• Package use
• Performance
• Logs

Learn

• Performance optimization (Emacs Lisp and core)
• Package descriptions and use

Code

• Issues
• Feature requests
• Integration
• New code

Lots of possibilities!

Here’s my visual summary of Stephen M. Shapiro’s 2011 book Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition (affiliate link). It’s a good book for people handling innovation management in medium and large enterprises, although small business owners might still be able to apply a few tips like the one about getting out and observing your customers (Lessons from Indiana Jones, p.69) and when to buy/innovate/hire solutions (There’s no such thing as a “know-it-all”, p.42).

Click on the image to view a larger version, and feel free to share it under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence!

Check out my other sketchnotes and visual book notes!