flow

I’m starting this blog here to make a coder-friendly open conversation with contributors and enthusiasts about flow’s design.

This blog will be doing two things in one move:

1. A source of fresh input, so feedback, so inspiration.
2. An output about progress on this line of work, so relevance of the mission.

But lets back up a bit, what is flow after all?

I like to say that flow is a mission with a framework.

Here is flow’s mission from the project’s readme:

flow’s mission is to provide consultants, startups and software houses with a competitive Smalltalk full-stack framework that allows them to quickly deliver a demo with all the modern html5 features the market expects today (2014). The idea is that they can tactically use this framework to keep momentum up among their prospects and clients and scale things to full successful projects delivered by kickass productive teams or individuals.

Why Smalltalk you might ask? Is a great question that should be experienced more than described, but if I have to tell you only three things about it, they will be around flow the psychological phenomenon embedded into the principles of design of Smalltalk itself and I particularly want to highlight that they help with:

*Intuition Instant feedback (discovery) Personal mastery *

Does that resonate in you? I encourage you to join this effort!

It’s all open source, MIT License, and the project's Kanban is being organized in this open board you can join here. By the way, I had the chance to presented flow at CampSmalltalkVI2014, big thanks to Sebastian Heidbrink for the hard work of organizing it and the invite!

There is no video about the talk but here are some slides I’ve made for it:

flow: a living full-stack ‎framework for the web

~900 views in a couple of days, and many shares? That’s a nice signal that we might just be into something here Beside a nice quantity of views on those slides what I like is the offline reception of the project and how people reacts to it during the few pairing session I had showing it. People is asking for the petshop sample app already!

I have concrete needs of my own with the framework, mostly being pulled by my clients and projects. That's great because is validated needs that will eventually cascade features to the framework. So all that is expected to be a major drive of course.

At the same time I'm interested in innovation in general and how talented individuals and teams deal with innovation for their needs so I’m curious about how would you push this mission forward. I see this blog like a good opportunity to ask design questions and talk about it.

In the next posts I'll write about the current technical challenges and hopefully you might have good ideas to share on how to face them best.

I'd like to expose things so people can understand why flow is a curated project and how it's being done.

But before digging ourselves into tech stuff too soon, let me ask you…

What do you think about the mission?

How would you use it?

If not, what stops you in using it? What bumps or showstoppers have you found?

Have your clients asked you to do Single Page Applications for them?