Remix all the things

This thought came to me after listening to this shanties a mashup of Nathan Evans - The Wellerman. And yes I'm aware mashup is something a bit different than a remix, but according to my understanding based on WikiDiff definition I think it's technically a remix.

And as you could read in About the same is with this "journal", it was inspired by others.

There are few original ideas under the sun, but to be an innovator one doesn't need to be original, as European Commission explains in their glossary

Innovation is the use of new ideas, products or methods where they have not been used before.

This brings us to Remix.run.

Throughout 90' Web 1.0 was all you could get. Sites built without any JS or CSS. built with iFrames or Tables. It was quite different times. Rocks and sticks...

Now Ryan wants to bring it back. He explains his rationale in a talk with Joel Hooks.

I look at this with interest cause Remix is build on top of The Platform™. For example, they try to use as much native stuff as possible, and apparently technically docs are ridden with links to MDN.

I've learned a lot only watching their YouTube channel where they post overviews of Remix progress. I especially recommend watching about caching headers.

Remix is quite odd cause it doesn't offer Static Site Generation. This is weird cause JAMStack is hot now. Despite not being mentioned (upon writing this) in ThoughtWorks TechRadar. Companies get millions from VC supporting it!

Vercel got another $40M in Dec 2020 after getting $21M in April 2020 where they said

This new identity aligns with our new focus — to provide the ultimate workflow for developing, previewing, and shipping Jamstack sites.

Which in total gives them more money than Gatsby got according to crounchbase. Which started its own hosting.

A few months ago Cloudflare joined the game with Pages.

The marked is hyped about SSG, so is Remix makes itself obsolete before even starting?

Not necessarily!

The biggest benefit of the JAMStack powered sites is that they are hosted on CDN, and with proper cache headers management, all server-generated pages can. (Really watch Ryan talk!).

Ryan and Ben aren't the only ones who use VS Code nowadays.

It seems that we all do. If you watch conferences live code, tutorials on YT, screenshots on Twitter almost everyone everywhere is using VS Code.

I still remember seeing it for the first time in an announcement. It has everything I needed at the time, and was way faster to start than WebStorm or Atom.

(Take into account that back then I was working via Remote Desktop)

Suddenly a few weeks ago I stumbled upon Lite and I was blown away. It was instant to open and interact with. Bit different experience that I have with Code nowadays.

It reminded me that I like fluent and interactive apps! And that I grew bored of Code after all those years.

Changing the theme wasn't enough this time.

Years ago Chris Granger posted video of a new editor called LightTable. I was blown away! And I waited eagerly to try it out.

But when it came out it was nothing like promised. It looked nice but was kinda slow. Configuration was in Clojure so it was hard to understand for me.

I think it was last year when I've read about Prune code editor by Kent Beck. Sadly no executable was released.

Kent's hypothesis was that by directly editing AST we will be faster with creating software. I think he missed a point.

In my view, the biggest benefit of basing code editor on AST over text is that enables us with much more tooling opportunities.

So there I was thinking what it could be when I noticed this tweet from Dion Systems.

It's mesmerizing to watch. Those interactions, this floating cursor 😍

There's more of this in their talk on Handmade Seattle talk.

I'm excited to see how will that evolve.

There was a moment in my life where I stopped thinking about editors, but at least for now, this moment is behind me. Again and again, I sent few minutes every now and then to see what's happening in this space.

Maybe Code is too mainstream for my taste 🤔

Here's few notable mentions:

• Kakoune - terminal based modal editor
• 4coder - Performant editor based loosely on Emacs written in C++
• Nova - Modern IDE, native to Macs
• OniVim2 - retro-futuristic modal editor combining Vim-style modal editing with the aesthetics and language features of modern editors