Jesse

[00:00:00 ] Brett:My guest this week is Jesse Grosjean, an independent developer. How’s it going, Jessie?

Jesse:Oh, good. Thanks for having me.

Brett:Uh, you were last on in 2012. That is so long ago.

Jesse:Yeah. Yeah. Um, it, I been programming ever since, although over time it seems like I programmed slower and slower, but that’s what I do.

Brett:Is that just part of aging or are you becoming more careful in your, in your older years?

Jesse:I don’t know. I think it’s, it’s part of, I have lots of fun programming and I learn more over time and I sort of, I think I get I’m Mo it at the moment. I’m more into like making my programs pretty and data structures and things. Not that I’m a super great person at that, but yeah. Uh, I don’t know. I’m very deep.

Like, I, I can tell you the story of my last few years and it all [00:01:00 ] started out with all right, let’s see how to search a bunch of files. And now I’m like four years or three years into Russ programming and parallel programming and all this stuff. And it was all just to search a few files.

Brett:Oh boy. Um, I have this habit, like I’ll start out a project with what I consider to be like a good. Bait like object. I don’t know what you call when you map out what properties and what objects and how everything’s going to interact. And then it gets out of hand so quickly. It’s I start adding too many properties and too many controllers.

And, uh, my, my apps after a year ended up being unmanageable and I ended up having to start over.

Jesse:Yeah. And I, for, for me, especially recently, I mean, I certainly have that problem. And what I do is I start over continuously and especially if I get stuck on something, my, my desktop is scattered with junk mail, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, all these little. [00:02:00 ] Junk things, trying to get all the mess out of the way.

So I can actually figure out the massive, my existing program out of the way. So I can figure out what this one little attribute does or something. But, uh, it, I, at the moment I keep on going deeper and deeper into probably stupid. I don’t know. I just let’s see if we can reinvent this, you know, but it is fun and it’s very, go ahead.

Brett:is this a, is this searching text files, uh, or searching files? Uh, is that your next project?

Jesse:Yeah. I mean, basically previous my sort of application history that is inter the way I look at it. Anyway, I did a few apps early on that were just kind of learning how to develop Mac stuff. And then the first one I had success with big success was with Rite room, which is a very. Simple app that just blocks out your screen and does full screen mode.

[00:03:00 ] And then, so the next step was task paper, which was okay. To-do list in a text file. People liked text files. I like text files. Let’s see how simple you can do that. And so task paper is a very simple syntax to make a to-do list. And I worked on that for a bit. And then. I wanted to, you know, always want to expand and make things, do more and stuff.

And so the next step was folding text and that, um, the basics of has, it takes a marked on file, then it makes it so you can fold the various, like, you know, in a code text editor, how you can fold, um, regions of text. Well, it does that in markdown structure and then it also, um, I like outliners a lot. And so the, the underlying model is really an outliner and that’s the same thing with TaskPaper it’s outliners that feel like text editors and, um, [00:04:00 ] folding text ads, uh, also a query language.

So you can filter the document by a query and it’s very sophisticated or complex or something like that, query language. And, uh, then. So, so that’s the direction I’ve been headed as time goes on, things get more complicated. I probably should have just stuck with right room, but then, then my, then my programming life would be boring.

Um, and, but right room, I sort of R sorry, folding text was sort of the big effort, but I didn’t like the way it turned out, particularly, um, in that. I for all these apps, I kind of use them for the same thing, which is, I’m not a very organized person. I don’t keep like long journey. I mean, I try sometimes to do journals or something, but mostly it’s just like a pizza sketch paper.

And I read out ideas on it, most of the time programming ideas, but I [00:05:00 ] just sort of, I’m very interested in the feel and the environment and folding text-based basing it on markdown, which. I on one hand think is great, but on the other hand, I don’t feel very calm in it with all the various things going on.

And anyway, and also folding text while the sales started out great, they were dropping so that past paper was selling better. And so anyway, I did do after folding text or rewrite of task paper just to modernize it. But then my, my big project, well, all those projects, what they share in common is, uh, very much, uh, uh, plain text based approach.

And then, uh, uh, strong, uh, rich, uh, I like to allow people to do plugins and things like that, so that they provide that kind of API APIs and the data model that people can change. Yeah. Extensibility. Yeah. Yeah. So I always think that’s [00:06:00 ] a fun, you know, I never use it basically ever in other other programs, I’m not really that kind of person, but just the idea really appeals to me.

And I like it. You know, I have fun doing that anyway, providing it. Um, so they’ve all plain text files with extensibility and, you know, they’re focused. Maybe towards tasks or something, but basically there, they try to be flexible programs that you can use for lots of different ways. And so the next thing I want to do is make it so that you can support multiple files.

Now, how hard can that be? And, uh, that’s what I’ve been working on since and in various forms. Um, but the, I guess the, the thing that, so basically my, my vision is. Very simple. You know, every code editor has this little file tree and you can browse through the files. And I liked that. Um, but [00:07:00 ] then for extensibility, I, there there’s a few details that I want different.

And so for example, save searches are always something that, um, people talk about in applications and in task paper. And so task paper, I build a new separate UI for saved searches. And it shows up in the sidebar, right. And you click on it and it shows the search results. Um, with multiple files, I’m starting to think sort of, I think of it isn’t instead of a text-based UIs like a file based UI.

So maybe there’s a new file type called search. And you just put that in one of your folders and it’s has a certain format, which saves your search, you know, in a plain text file. When you click on it, it will open a document, which. Show search results. And it seems to me like that’s a pretty extensible way you could do, you know, a calendar or it’s an extensible way.

So you have a basic database of text files, and then you can have some text files, which are plugins [00:08:00 ] that they store their data and texts, but they show, you know, you can, they’re more user interface than what we think of as text file. If that makes any sense at all. right. I think they, yeah. And they that’s interesting cause yeah, I’ve tried both of them, b