(2023-04-17) Herokus Adam Wiggins On Making Computers Better

Heroku's Adam Wiggins on making computers better. Adam Wiggins co-founded Heroku, the pioneering PaaS company, and is the founder of Muse App. He's also had a hand in interesting projects like Ink and Switch and has written extensively on the philosophy of computing at Making Computers Better.

we may only still be at the beginning of this integration of digital technology to human life and society. So if you work to change the trajectory of the computing industry just a little bit now, my hunch is the effect may be felt dramatically 50 or 100 years from now.

Early in my career, I was skeptical of Aristotle-style deep thinkers. But I eventually came to appreciate the value of an academic approach to understanding the past, present, and future of computing in our lives. A Bill Buxton quote I like is: “Head in the clouds, feet in the mud.”

Online identity is a catastrophe happening in slow motion. Internet fraud keeps getting worse—it’s a multibillion-dollar “industry,”

Muse is an infinite canvas for thinking. It gives you a mixed-media canvas: imagine a combination of Figma, Notion, and a physical whiteboard. (tools for thought)

You can use it privately to do research, strategy, and rumination; or together with your team for planning, retrospectives, and roadmaps. It’s built as a high-speed native app for Mac and iPad, and uses local-first sync so that it works offline but also allows for realtime and asynchronous collaboration.

Local-first software is our answer to how we can improve on “the cloud.” Cloud software (web apps, or native apps which connect to internet APIs) gives us all kinds of benefits such as easy sharing and collaboration.

My colleagues and I wrote Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud four years ago, building on a decade of computer science work in academia on CRDTs [conflict-free replicated data types].

My colleague sometimes describes this as “Google Docs without Google.”

My greatest hope is that computers continue to be the best tools for creative expression and problem-solving that humanity has ever created.