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**Jerod Santo:** We've had him on Go Time, episode 28, way back in the day. He's been on the show a few times, and... I haven't read that one, but I've heard a lot of people also vouch for it. |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, and I've looked at some projects that other people have built following the book, and that also looks amazing. And those are quite easy to follow. If you know the base language - for those books it's Go - you can sort of follow it like any other programming tutorial. It'll sort of teach you the bas... |
I think the great thing about programming languages as a project is there's so many things to customize... You can customize security, customize the syntax, you can change how the different built-in functions act... So follow one of these great guides that exist already, and hack away at it to your liking. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[36:14\] So you've made mistakes with Ink, and you now have brought forth Ink 2.0, or this new thing; it's the unnamed project... What are some of the things that you decided to change, or what motivated you to go ahead and write a second, new programming language, that's at least I assume similar to ... |
**Linus Lee:** So it's similar in that it's keeping all the things that I actually like about Ink, around its simplicity and focus on first-class functions, and closures, and callback-based asynchrony. I would not say I'm bringing it forth; it's still kind of under wraps, but I can talk about it a little bit. |
The reason that I started working on it actually is a little bit embarrassing... I got this great chance to give a talk about Ink in this year's [GopherCon](https://youtu.be/watch?v=ALwmdcFiuGg), happening later this year. The organizers have asked me to talk about the process of building your own programming language ... |
Ink is callback-based, even-loop-based, a lot like JavaScript. A lot of the syntax is staying, but I'm introducing a few more keywords. Ink is very heavy on sigiles, like symbols. That's nice, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, that there's no English keywords in the language, but it's a little hard to use... So I... |
In Ink there is a read function that reads from a file and a write function that writes to a file, and one of the things I've found difficult while building more sophisticated products with Ink was like sometimes you wanna keep a handle to a file and read from it over and over again. Sometimes you want to truncate a fi... |
In my head, there's a mental list of all the things that are like "Oh, I wish it worked a little differently", from all the projects that I've built with Ink... And I'm trying to add them in without succumbing to the pressure of trying to do too many things originally. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So you should have that done, plus your talk in time for GopherCon, right? October... |
**Linus Lee:** I think it's sometime in December. |
**Jerod Santo:** December, that's right. December. |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** No pressure. |
**Linus Lee:** You know, it's sort of in the back of my mind, working on it when I have time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Going back to career and what you said before when Jerod asked you in the first part of the show... I think you said it's kind of backwards. You're trying to not take what you've learned at the job back to your side-projects. You're sort of taking your side projects to your job. So back to the caree... |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, that sounds right. Just because I've worked on a lot of things on my side, a lot of the people that I got to meet and talk to, the people that I might work with in the future, things like that - a lot of that ends up being related to what I'm thinking about on the side. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[39:56\] So when you keep layering on Ink 2.0 or things like that, you're not necessarily doing it so that you can get that FOMO job, your friend, or whatever purple cow moment in yourself, essentially. You're just trying to keep doing what you do on the side. It sounds like that's what you're opti... |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, and I think if you're working on things -- at least for me, I've found that if I work on things that most fascinate me and intellectually excite me on my side, it's always gonna lead to me talking to people that are working on some of the things. With Monocle - it's a personal search engine. That i... |
**Break**: \[41:04\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So let's turn to Monocle then. We've talked around it... Let's talk about it. Personal universal search... I like this idea of a personal knowledge base; not just the things that you put out in the public, but all the things. Because I feel like my data is spread about different apps in different locat... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** We're gonna get into (I think) sharing at some point, because I think with knowledge it goes beyond the personal and you wanna collaborate or share knowledge... But just my personal knowledge, it just feels like I can't clean my room. |
So I like that you're tackling this problem, and we will talk about how it has inspired other people, because I've found another project that's directly inspired by Monocle trying to do it in a slightly different way. So tell us about your ideas around personal search and why you decided to try to tackle that problem. |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah. So Monocle is a personal search engine. What it does is it indexes a bunch of data sources that I have in my life - my notes, my contacts, all of my blog entries, all the bookmarks that I have and the text inside them, all my tweets, my journal entries over the last few years, and it basically make... |
\[44:13\] Like a lot of my projects, this started as a learning project. So Monocle was spun off of this bit of code that I was experimenting with to figure out how full-text search engines worked, and search indexes worked... So once I had that search index working, I was like "Well, what do I wanna search with this?"... |
I think search is interesting from a personal tool -- I bet there's a lot of companies working on search from like an enterprise perspective, of like search for your team's documents, or search your Google Docs and Notion in one place, or something... But I think from a personal perspective it's really interesting, bec... |
So I think there's a lot of still kind of creative thinking to be done there and low-hanging fruits for making it easy to just find information. |
**Jerod Santo:** Like Jean-Luc Picard he just says "Computer, tell me about this person", and then it just tells him. |
**Linus Lee:** Right, exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** He doesn't have to go stand at the holodeck, or the bridge. Wherever he is, he just says "Computer..." |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah. You don't have to look in the right folder, or look in the right app, or search for the exact right keywords, or time, or something. |
**Jerod Santo:** And I totally do that. I'm like "Is that in my notes app? Is that in the text file on my desktop? Is that in a database somewhere? Is that in my bank account?" You know, just searching all the things. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I wonder if it's because everybody's at odds, really. I think about it with Siri, for example. You have to be specific. "Siri, play X on Spotify", for example. There's all these at odds within this tech sphere. It's almost like this space doesn't get better because there's so much money at stake tha... |
**Jerod Santo:** Cancelled my notes? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...you know what I mean -- what could you do? You could do nothing, right? You could move notes, but you might have history gone... Who knows. I'm not trying to say that you're literally not in control, but the balance of power is really in the giants' hands, for the most part. |
**Jerod Santo:** I have a good friend who actually had a note disappear. This was a couple of years ago, back before -- was it CloudKit that came out? There was a point where iOS got significantly more reliable on notes. Messages got better, contact sync got better, and notes just generally got better. Maybe three year... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A month or two back I said that I messed up my son deleted this whole entire thread of this army buddy I had; my best buddy, my battle buddy in the army... And then we go back ten years, or whenever I got the iPhone, the history has been there, talking about people we've known in the military that h... |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[48:15\] Even if we think we are. |
**Jerod Santo:** Linus is. Linus has all of his tools right there on his laptop. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Linus Lee:** You actually hit on something that I've been thinking about a lot recently... As the driving philosophy for building all my tools and also search is so much over workflows around our data and our information are digital tools are product-focused and company-focused, instead of problem-focused... Which I ... |
A great example that I just said earlier is like "I wanna look up this person and see what I know about this person." I have to search through all of these products and these tools, instead of just looking up the person. This happens in general because companies wanna keep users to their product. Apple doesn't really w... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Linus Lee:** So I think that's a good benefit to building your own tools as well. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It lets you go out in the world and do your thing too, right? You can go out and tweet, you can go out and blog, you can do whatever, and you can determine a source point, I'm sure, to bring back into Monocle for searching later. It lets you just be who you wanna be, wherever you wanna do it at, and... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** When I first started looking into Monocle more, and just this idea that you said you have, a decade of journals... I started thinking about people of the past, like Albert Einstein, or super-smart people that have impacted the idea of relativity, for example; the way we think about physics, the way ... |
**Linus Lee:** Definitely. There's a lot to it. This is getting into sharing knowledge tools space. At a basic level, you can take all of Albert Einstein's notes, or Elon Musk's notes, or Marie Curie's notes, or whatever, and just make it public. There's a lot of that data already out there, a lot of documents are publ... |
I think the hard thing about sharing ideas is what I call by one label is not necessarily gonna be exactly what you call by another label. So there's kind of like a labeling problem. |
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