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• The potential for side projects to become commercial endeavors, but Linus Lee's preference to maintain a clear boundary between side projects and commercial work |
• Building personal projects for oneself vs. others |
• Benefits of publishing personal projects, including inspiration for others |
• Introduction to Ink, a personal programming language created by Linus Lee |
• Reasons for creating Ink, including addressing complaints about existing languages |
• Evolution of Ink over time, with a focus on iterative development and ecosystem growth |
• Linus Lee's perspective on using Ink for personal projects, rather than designing it for others to use |
• Discussion of the potential consequences of others relying on Ink for serious projects or startups |
• The designer of the Ink language discusses its simplicity and lack of complex features like inheritance and operator overloading. |
• The language is syntactically similar to JavaScript, but with a focus on functions and objects. |
• Ink does not have built-in database drivers or file system hooks, but can interact with the outside world through a file system interface and HTTP networking interface. |
• The designer uses Ink for personal projects, but acknowledges that it may not be a viable language for commercial use. |
• Despite this, the designer believes that the skills and knowledge gained from working with Ink can be transferred to other languages and programming tasks. |
• The designer uses a custom syntax highlighter and code formatter for Ink, and has built a personal infrastructure for working with the language. |
• Linus Lee's personal coding project, Ink, has limitations due to its syntax not being recognized by Vim |
• Linus uses a formatter tool, Ink Fmt, and a proxy, Kin, to syntax highlight Ink code |
• Discussion around getting Ink recognized as an official GitHub language |
• Linus is concerned about potential contributors and their expectations, given the project's personal nature |
• He emphasizes the "forking model" of open source, allowing others to create their own versions |
• Linus is working on an Ink 2.0 version, addressing past complaints about the original language |
• He faces challenges in finding a new name for the language, with "Oak" being one of the suggested options |
• The speaker's initial fear of being a "waste of time" in the software engineering field diminished as people found interest in their personal projects. |
• The speaker realized there are multiple ways to practice software engineering and that their unique approach and skills are valuable. |
• The concept of being the "purple cow" was introduced, meaning standing out and being different from the crowd. |
• Writing one's own programming language was cited as a unique and impressive achievement. |
• Linus Lee advised those wanting to write their own language to start with something simple, build from there, and utilize available resources such as books and tutorials. |
• Writing an interpreter in Go and the book "Writing an Interpreter in Go" by Thorsten Ball |
• Linus Lee's new project, an unnamed programming language similar to Ink, with changes to simplify and improve its ergonomics |
• Career and side projects: Linus's approach to career development, choosing a 9-to-5 based on side projects and learning from them |
• Monocle: a personal universal search engine project and its goals of building a personal knowledge base and searching across different apps and locations |
• Personal search engine Monocle indexes various data sources, including notes, contacts, blog entries, and tweets, to enable full-text search. |
• The concept of a personal search engine is seen as innovative and a potential solution to the problem of scattered personal data. |
• Companies focus on product-focused and company-focused solutions rather than problem-focused ones, leading to inefficiencies and limitations in information retrieval. |
• Building one's own tools, like Monocle, allows for a problem-focused approach and a more streamlined experience for users. |
• This approach also allows users to think about their information and workflows in a more integrated and holistic way. |
• The current state of technology and user interface design can be restrictive, requiring users to adapt to multiple products and services rather than having a unified search experience. |
• Monocle as a tool for indexing and sharing knowledge, and its potential to democratize access to the ideas and notes of influential people like Albert Einstein and Elon Musk |
• The challenges of making such a tool public, including the need for searchable and annotated data, and the potential for a labeling problem |
• The benefits of sharing knowledge databases, including the potential for improved collaboration and idea-sharing within teams and organizations |
• The importance of privacy and consent in sharing knowledge, and the need for clear boundaries and trust in order to facilitate knowledge sharing |
• The use of Monocle in a team environment, and the potential for employees to share their knowledge and expertise with each other |
• The motivation behind creating Monocle, which was to solve the problem of being unable to quickly look up and access relevant information and knowledge. |
• Monocle's functionality and how it indexes and keeps track of personal data |
• The concept of public and private data within Monocle, with public data being available for search and private data being inaccessible to others |
• The potential for individuals to create their own personal search indexes, rather than relying on external services |
• The idea of having separate versions of personal data for public and private use |
• The evolution of Linus Lee's thinking on search and personal information as he built and used Monocle |
• The potential for building and experimenting with personal search indexes to solve individual problems and meet specific needs |
• Search is an unsolved problem, with both practical and conceptual challenges |
• Building personal search engines is tractable and has potential for innovation |
• Search engines can be used to "search yourself" and revisit past thoughts and knowledge |
• Monocle is an example of a personal search engine that indexes a user's own data |
• Using personal search engines can create a filter bubble, but can also facilitate internal connections and reinforcement of existing knowledge |
• Building personal search engines can be a way to encourage people to explore and innovate in the search space |
• Monocle-inspired project Apollo mentioned as a separate, more general-purpose tool |
• Discussion of Apollo's unique features and how it differs from Monocle |
• Comparison of Apollo's visual interface to Google's old-school design |
• Inspirations for building personal software and sharing it with others |
• Advice on approaching new projects with a can-do attitude and a focus on learning. |
**Jerod Santo:** So we're joined by Linus Lee. You may know him as thesephist. I think it's thesephist... Linus, how do you say that? |
**Linus Lee:** The Sephist, as in the, the English article, and then Sephist. |
**Jerod Santo:** The Sephist. I might submit to you an underscore or maybe a hyphen... Take out the ambiguity. |
**Linus Lee:** I like to keep it as simple as that. And there's some fun in the ambiguity. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] That is true. What is a sephist? I don't even know what that is. |
**Linus Lee:** When I was going to high school I was very into linguistics, and at one point I took on this kind of fun project of trying to invest myself my own language. So the word "sephist" means something in that language. The exact meaning I'll keep off the record... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Linus Lee:** Nothing shady, it's just fun, but... |
**Jerod Santo:** Mysterious. |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, I'll keep the mystery... But it's just a word from that language. And actually, it's funny, because since then I've gotten into programming languages and other kinds of languages... But yeah, it's a remnant of that, and it's a unique enough handle that nobody else has taken it on any social media s... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[03:47\] That is nice to have. So I've found you by way of Monocle, which is your personal universal search engine. And when I've found that - I was reading about it, and you said "This is written in Ink", and I was like "What's Ink?" and it's your own programming language. And then you have your own ... |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, so side projects was kind of how I -- it's how I learned to program, and it's still how I learn new things. I think the way that I think about side projects is pretty different from the way most people - or like the hackathon crowd, to the industry - likes to think about side projects. My side proj... |
**Jerod Santo:** So do you have a primary hustle? Do you not need a side hustle? |
**Linus Lee:** I have a primary hustle. I work at a company called Ideaflow, one of the companies building tools for thought, as they say; a note-taking app that tries to be a lot smarter without being a lot more complicated. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So the side projects usually come out of or intertwine what you're thinking of during your nine-to-five, or are they usually completely separate things? Because it seems like, you know, tools for thought, as we get into Monocle, it's kind of related to that to a certain degree. |
**Linus Lee:** They are related. The causality actually goes backwards. So I actually am fortunate to say to try to run into people and find companies I could work at where I can still think about the things that I'm interested in during my day job... But my general interest is in building better tools, better creative... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** In your dayjob do you get to do a lot of the same things? Is there any crossover in terms of like -- you know, when you do things for yourself it's a lot of autonomy. You can do things that you wanna do, whereas maybe in the dayjob you sort of have to concern yourself with the revenue, or customers.... |
**Linus Lee:** There's quite a bit of crossover. I'd say there's actually a lot of knowledge transfer. So a lot of the things I've been messing around with on my side projects around search, and sort of semantically grouping ideas together and surfacing them - a lot of those things carry over into building a better not... |
One of the cons of my side projects is I don't really put a lot of effort into making them usable for other people, and other people just complain about that; they're like "Why isn't there a commercial version?" So I try to bring some of those ideas over when I can. And sometimes, when I can do that, it's great. But it... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you think your side projects will always be make for yourself, or do you think you'll eventually get to a point where you're just like "You know what - I've made this for myself and I can see the usefulness to other people", and you sort of maybe begin the true side hustle? |
**Linus Lee:** The true side hustle... |
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