Useful Programming Ideas

The majority of these come from my dabbling in the local-first ecosytem for the past 2-3 years. I would like this page to act both as a useful resource and a personal history through these ideas, so I point to the sourcesof these ideas in the order that I found them instead of attempting any long explanation of my own.

Fractional indexing

Found through Evan Wallace’s blog post, and used a naive integer-based version for the v0.5 of Scatterpad. The sorting things on a canvas video from tldraw provides a more robust algorithm, using lexographic order instead of infinitely dividing numbers.

I personally use the jittered-fractional-indexing library, which in turn forks the original from the lovely folks at Rocicorp.

Hashing

The first time this really clicked for me was when I saw a hash of a schema being used to invalidate an old store. A hash is a way to give a name to something after the fact!

Signals

Encountered through Signia, and from then on I wrote all my apps with these as the foundation whenever possible. Solid’s component model (or should I say, lack of one) is probably the best example of the ideas in action.