In today’s world, apps and their data are tightly coupled—but what if each person could pick and choose their own tool for use in a collaborative project? Geoffrey Litt is a researcher working on this problem at MIT. He joins Mark and Adam to talk about email as the original BYOC case study; how shared protocols enable niche software; whether it’s possible to design software for someone other than yourself; and how to accidentally become an expert.

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Show notes

• Geoffrey Litt / @geoffreylitt
• “teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”
• Project Cambria
• MIT Software Design Group
• Ink & Switch
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Doug Engelbart
• Superorganizers profile of Geoffrey including Muse screenshots
• Bring Your Own Client
• email as one of the first internet protocols
• Pine, Mutt
• Superhuman, Front, Tempo
• not many clients support video in HTML emails
• tractor attachments and the three-point hitch
• HTML meta tags for Google and Twitter
• progress enhancement
• reverse engineering
• ad blockers
• end-user programming
• aspiring programmer progressing from Livejournal to HTML coding
• PHP
• Hubspot, Mailchimp
• “toolmaker humility” from Balint @ Craft
• Solid
• accessibility in collaborative writing
• VS Code won the text editor wars
• “ed is the standard text editor”
• episode on video games
• Flash, Java servlet
• Changing Minds
• Bonnie Nardi
• ethnographic study of distributed problem-solving in spreadsheets
• Wildcard