Kartik Agaram

Barbarian programmer. I think a lot of computing culture is deeply influenced by the interests of large organizations (countries, companies, etc.) and want to swing the pendulum back towards the interests of individual people. Computers for humans.

These days I try to build programs that are useful, easy to install, easy to run, easy to modify, easy to share. I call them Freewheeling Apps. The key constraint I care about is depending as little as possible on software that auto-updates. I find that that one constraint tends to lead me towards software that is easy to modify, attentive to the needs of individual users, empowers individuals, etc.

A lot about permacomputing resonates a lot with me, and yet I go back and forth on whether I 'practice' permacomputing with my projects. I don't focus much on reducing hardware footprint back to a 6502, or using a computer more energy-efficiently. Instead, I tend to obsess about the code complexity of software. Using the hardware people tend to have more efficiently without squandering it in a combinatorial explosion of software. My approach has a footprint orders of magnitude smaller than most software out there, but I suspect it's still an order of magnitude less efficient than the typical permacomputing project here. For example, my text2.love is a graphical screen-oriented editor in 1200 lines of Lua, where the peoples-permacomputer LED editor is line-oriented, text-based and fits in 300 lines of BASIC.

Some other programs I've built:

• a notebook UI in 4k lines of Lua.
• a barebones hypertext browser in 1k lines of Lua.
• a framework in the hypertext browser for automatically selecting foreground-background color combinations with sufficient contrast to be accessible to people spanning a range of visual acuity. This takes 200 lines of Lua.

For more programs and other news, see my Freewheeling Apps devlog.