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Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

Colin McDonnell · 25K views · 2015-06-17 · 54:20

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Overview

Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.

On Hacker News

HN commenters cite it as the best demonstration of why instant feedback matters in programming tools.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2015–2024

Topics

GUI, HCI & interface historyTesting, debugging & developer toolsTech pioneers & interviews
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bret victorlive programminginstant feedbackdeveloper toolstime travel debugging

What people said

ripley12 · 2024-11 · Strong recommendation

I absolutely care about things that take hundreds of milliseconds for my builds. The faster I can build, the faster I can iteratively try new things things out. The goal should be to be able to see changes instantly after you make them, and Tailwind is usually just 1 part of a build pipeline. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is probably the best demonstration of why this matters; in the first 10 minutes he shows a very concrete example of an insight that would not have occurred without instant feedback [VIDEO]

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jdiez17 · 2015-11 · Strong recommendation

Bret Victor's talks are a counter example to this. His live programming in this[1] talk is nothing short of mind blowing. [1] [VIDEO]

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flyaway123 · 2022-08 · Reference

A lot of the thought process here seems to move into Bret Victor's talk on 'Inventing on Principle'[0] [0] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Colin McDonnell, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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