What if there was a tool that could make designing software more like designing objects with Photoshop? That's the idea behind a new software design tool being built by Jeff Lindsay.
Lindsay has one of the longer and more interesting histories in software. Jeff is the software engineer who coined and evangelized webhooks in 2007 and revolutionized web development. His SuperHappyDevHouse LAN parties turned into the earliest Silicon Valley Hackathons before anyone coined that term. And he helped bring Docker to the world with Dokku.
We invited Jeff to speak at our monthly Codingscape Product Practice about his new plans to change software development with a tool he calls Tractor.
Here’s the full video.
Building a new world of Software w/ Jeff Lindsay
Design software like creatives use Photoshop
Lindsay takes us on a walkthrough of his new software design tool, which is designed to allow users to design software in a similar way that Photoshop allows users to design images.
The tool is ambitious in its scope, not meant for just one kind of software, but rather all kinds including command-line tools, distributed systems, and embedded systems.
Here's a TLDR summary of the video:
- Building the Photoshop of software – Jeff Lindsay shows the theory behind and mechanics of his design tool for software called Manifold.
- File system abstraction – A key feature of the tool is its file system abstraction. Essentially, everything you do on the system is done through working with files or manipulating data streams that look like files. This makes it easy to simplify things and combine different functionalities together.
- Unity Game engine as a universal code editor – How Unity gets file abstraction right and Jeff Lindsay is building a software design tool that allows users to design software in a similar way that Lego bricks allow you to build creations.
- Use cases for Tractor so far – One example is a Trello clone and another is a system that combines OBS for video streaming and WebRTC for audio.
- Easier software development – The overall goal of this software design tool is to make software development more intuitive and easier. The idea is that users should be able to take different software components and combine them together in new and innovative ways.
Jeff is continuously working on this project to help reduce the massive amount of unnecessary complexity in software development. He pays a small team of contractors and collaborators to keep this independent research and development going forward. If you want to see this project come to life and are able to contribute financially, you can sponsor the work here on Github.
Examples of Tractor in use
Lindsay mentions a few examples of how this file system abstraction can be used in the video. One example is a Trello clone that he built last year. In this example, the data model is broken down into cards and labels, and these cards and labels can be manipulated through the file system.
Another example is a system that uses OBS for video streaming and WebRTC for audio. By using file system abstractions, Lindsay was able to combine these two different functionalities together to create a new system for remote movie nights.
Overall, the goal of this software design tool is to make software development more like working with Photoshop. The idea is that users should be able to take different software components and combine them together in new and innovative ways. Lindsay believes that this will make it easier to create new and complex software systems.
While there's no release date for the tool yet, Lindsay's concept has the potential to revolutionize the way software is designed.
If you're interested in learning more about software design or Jeff Lindsay's work, make sure to watch the full video.
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