Figure 1. Virtually eliminates your coding load. FLOW-MATIC promotional brochure (1957) No-code is a hot new topic for programming startups. The idea is to develop a system that allows end-users to do the programming they need without the difficult task of writing code. There are no-code systems for building mobile apps, analysing data and many more. It is perhaps not a surprise that "eliminating programming load" is not as new idea as some people may think and there is an excellent blog series on no-co[...]

Early in my career I believed that Tech Writers were a interface role to Marketing and Sales. As a product focused developer, I didn’t understand the true value of Tech Writers beyond cleaning up content to make it customer friendly as in the places where I worked this is the role they most often took. […]

In conversations with people who are much smarter about education than am I, one idea that came up was this notion of foundational knowledge. To define “foundational knowledge” by analogy think of learning basic arithmetic. First you learn addition then subtraction, multiplication and finally you move on to division. I can’t claim to understand the […]

 The idea was that you set the colored piece of cardboard on the keyboard at a certain position and then by following the colors in a special songbook one could pick out a tune.

I started to learn how to program in high school at the end of the 1990s using a mix of BASIC, Turbo Pascal and HTML with JavaScript. The seed for this blog post comes from my experience with learning how to program in JavaScript, without having much guidance or organized resources. This article continues a theme that I started in my interactive Commodore 64 article, which is to look at past programming systems and see what interesting past ideas have been lost in contemporary systems. Unlike with Commodor[...]