Useful Programming Ideas

The majority of these come from my dabbling in the local-first ecosystem 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 sources of these ideas in the order that I found them instead of attempting any long explanation of my own.

Good list here.

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. There’s also one from tldraw, optimised for their use case.

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.

Idempotency

https://lightfoot.dev/why-arent-you-idempotent/

Binary search

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-find-things-an-intro-to-binary

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