Failure Driven Development

2025-05-02

May 02, 2025

Video

I discuss my programming workflow in this the following video.

Meta

I had written a slide deck several years ago and posted it to my github pages blog.

I used that older slide deck to write a refreshed version of the slides using Keynote (Apple's Powerpoint) using the auto-adjusting font-size of commercial slide-deck-making technology to alert me as to when I was blathering too much. Most other slide technologies, like Obsidian, also let me create slides but I tend to blather and froth and run on without the instant feedback provided by Keynote/Powerpoint UI (see below, re. “Flow”).

Several days later, I reviewed/edited each slide and wrote (in Drafts) discussion paragraphs. I applied "Apple Intelligence” to each paragraph. I find “Apple Intelligence” easier to use for writing than using the Claude 3.7 GUI. I chose to use the “friendly" style.

Then, I asked Descript to use an AI voice actor to read the discussions, pasted each slide into the evolving video/audio. Meta: I exported the slide deck out as transparent, background-less jpgs, then glued 10 minutes of silent background under the whole thing to improve slide-to-slide background continuity. Descript is my video maker/editor of choice today, I find it to be 10x more productive than anything else I've tried. Most everything else uses a timeline editor (like I had suffered with using DAWs), whereas Descript transforms the whole thing into a text editor with easy-to-identify sections.

I think that there are places where the spoken script adds/says-differently information that isn't on the slides - stuff that I elided to simplify the slides, trying to avoid TL;DR syndrome.

When I write this all out, it looks laborious, but it is a fairly painless and repeatable workflow for me. The technical stuff is automated and stays out of my way when I'm in "flow" - thinking/writing about the problem and what-I-want-to-say. I learned from song-writing and golf that "flow" is extremely important and using any workflow that breaks "flow" with stupid questions - like file saving dialogs (or any modal dialog, as per Jef Raskin) is seriously injurious. We need more discussion (and papers?), like in the newer trend in golf, about how maintaining "flow" is directly related to productivity in programming.

Paul’s Substack

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