feenk blog

Explaining the squarified treemap algorithm from Glamorous Toolkit

We had a long lasting issue in the Glamorous Toolkit text editor. It was only when we could inspect the underlying Rust objects that we could find the solution. Here is the story.

Published by Tudor Girba 26 February 2023

Identifying an editor bug by inspecting wrapped Rust objects in Glamorous Toolkit

We had a long lasting issue in the Glamorous Toolkit text editor. It was only when we could inspect the underlying Rust objects that we could find the solution. Here is the story.

Published by Tudor Girba 26 February 2023

Optimizing the links from the Glamorous Toolkit book for first time readers

Writing isolated pieces of documentation can be entertaining, but sometimes we want to enhance the findability of those pieces. Here is how we guided the linking of pages in the Glamorous Toolkit book.

Published by Tudor Girba 23 February 2023

How to set completion in a Glamorous Toolkit editor

Glamorous Toolkit offers a flexible editor. One of the parts that can be customized is the completion strategy. But how do we go about learning how to set our own completion in an editor?

Published by Tudor Girba 10 February 2023

How to browse and search the file system from Glamorous Toolkit

A few quick ways to browse and search the file system from within Glamorous Toolkit.

Published by Tudor Girba 5 February 2023

How to find your way through the inside of Glamorous Toolkit: printing a Json to a file

An example of finding an explanation about Glamorous Toolkit from and with the environment.

Published by Tudor Girba 1 February 2023

How to find stuff in GT in 7' - video

In this video we go through several complementary ways to query and explore Glamorous Toolkit code from within Glamorous Toolkit.

Published by Tudor Girba 11 January 2023

GT in 7' video series

GT in 7' is a new series of videos in which provide short guided tours to various aspects of Glamorous Toolkit.

Published by Tudor Girba 11 January 2023

Moldable Development Story - SessionManager

This story is about SessionManager, an object responsible for managing how sessions work in Pharo. We look at how custom views allow us to answer domain-specific questions.

Published by Andrei Chis 7 November 2022

Enhancing the support for multi-step refactorings in Glamorous Toolkit

We are enhancing the support in Glamorous Toolkit for refactorings that require multiple actions and steps. Our goal is to support everything with no modal dialogs.

Published by Tudor Girba 7 November 2022

Lessons learnt from building a tiny inspector extension

A tiny inspector extension for managing missing files proves to also be a nice example of how Moldable Development works over time.

Published by Tudor Girba 6 November 2022

A story of Moldable Development: styling an error from the build log

We recently got a new error in the build of Glamorous Toolkit. But before we addressed the problem, we first took a moment to extend our tools.

Published by Tudor Girba 4 September 2022

How to scale the UI

It is possible to specify the extra zoom factor which is when multiplied with the window scale factor gives the final UI scale factor.

Published by Andrei Chis 22 August 2022

How to create a standalone app

Creating a standalone app based on Glamorous Toolkit is as simple as opening an application specific window and closing the existing GT window. This can be achieved in just a few steps.

Published by Andrei Chis 21 August 2022

How to create a standalone app

Creating a standalone app based on Glamorous Toolkit is as simple as opening an application specific window and closing the existing GT window. This can be achieved in just a few steps.

Published by Andrei Chis 21 August 2022

Drawing Multiple Sprites Of A Water Tank

An exercise of creating multiple sprites out of a given picture. The exercise shows how we can mold the environment in different ways along the way.

Published by Tudor Girba 22 January 2022

Exploring Unoptimized whileTrue: Loops in Pharo

In Pharo, some whileTrue: messages sends are inlined, and some are not. How do we find those that are not and how can we distinguish between them? And what can we learn by doing that?

Published by Tudor Girba 8 January 2022

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Glamorous World #10: Mariano Guerra and Tudor Girba

A little while ago Mariano Guerra asked whether our work at feenk belongs in the space between academia and industry. Soon thereafter we found ourselves in a two-hour long conversation that touched on our motivation, how we work and the thinking behind Moldable Development and Glamorous Toolkit.

Published by Tudor Girba 31 October 2021

Introducing Synced Remote Images in Glamorous Toolkit

Until now, Glamorous Toolkit worked in a single image running on one processor. This was fine until we worked on figuring out what Moldable Development is, but now want to benefit from the multiple processors from our machines. That is why we are introducing support for parallel computations in Glamorous Toolkit.

Published by Tudor Girba 31 October 2021

Steering Agile Architecture by Example: the Feature Toggles From Open edX

How do you keep documentation in sync with the code? How do you steer agile architecture? And how do you do that without reading code?

Published by Tudor Girba 10 September 2021

Some References Related to the Cost of Code Reading, Software Comprehension and Software Maintenance

You'll often hear us say that developers today typically spend 50% or more on code reading. Why do we say that?

Published by Tudor Girba 7 August 2021

Moving the Git Repositories of Glamorous Toolkit to the Main Branch

We made the Glamorous Toolkit repositories rely on main instead of the master branch.

Published by Tudor Girba 6 August 2021

Introducing Lepiter: Knowledge Management + Multi-language Notebooks + Moldable Development

More than a decade ago, we set out to make the inside of software systems explainable. We started from the observation that software engineering is primarily a decision making activity about lots of ever changing data points represented in code and other artifacts. We conjectured that tools are essential in this endeavor but for them to be effective they have to be adaptable to the context of each single development problem. They have to be moldable.

Published by Tudor Girba 31 July 2021

Guest post: Running Glamorous Toolkit on virtual Linux systems

Want to run Glamorous Toolkit on virtual Linux systems? Our community figured it out.

Published by Konrad Hinsen 8 April 2021

Testimonial: Moldable database analysis

Carlos Lopez is a developer. He started to work with Glamorous Toolkit recently. He used it for reasoning about a database he did not know. Here is the description of his experience in his own words.

Published by Carlos Lopez 12 March 2021

Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

What does it mean when we say that developers spend most of their time figuring the system out? Why is it important? And how else could we look at this problem?

Published by Tudor Girba 27 January 2021

Mapping legacy software crises

We untangle your software legacy crises. How? Take a tour guided by Wardley maps.

Published by Tudor Girba 16 January 2021

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Glamorous World #2: Tudor Girba and Jacob Goodman

In this session Tudor Girba answers questions from Jacob Goodman and provides a guided tour.

Published by Tudor Girba 9 November 2020

Glamorous Toolkit Live #4: Moldable analysis of Java systems

How can we solve real problems without reading code? Through custom analyses.

Published by Tudor Girba 8 November 2020

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Glamorous World #1: Tudor Girba and Aria Minaei

We started a new video series entitled The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Glamorous World in which we have conversations with newcomers to Glamorous Toolkit.

Published by Tudor Girba 1 November 2020

Glamorous Toolkit Live #2: Inspector views and working with REST APIs

Glamorous Toolkit Live #2 is now available. It's about how we use the inspector to reason about a REST API.

Published by Tudor Girba 31 October 2020

Glamorous Toolkit Live #3: Example-driven development

Glamorous Toolkit Live #3 is here. We covered example-driven development.

Published by Tudor Girba 31 October 2020

Moldable development at IDE Summit 2020

At IDE Summit 2020, I talked about moldable development and how we should not read code. It appeared to be at least intriguing, if not outright contrarian.

Published by Tudor Girba 28 October 2020

How to create a standalone app with Glamorous Toolkit

Creating a standalone app based on Glamorous Toolkit is as simple as opening an application specific window and closing the GT window. This can be achieved in just a few steps.

Published by Aliaksei Syrel 27 October 2020

Glamorous Toolkit Live #1

The very first Glamorous Toolkit Live is now available.

Published by Tudor Girba 18 October 2020

Moldable Development lecture at the University of Bern

I had the pleasure of giving a lecture on Moldable Development as part of the Software Modeling and Analysis course from the University of Bern. This was exciting because this is the very first university course that relies on Glamorous Toolkit.

Published by Tudor Girba 17 October 2020

How to customize the home tab of Glamorous Toolkit

Everything can be customized in Glamorous Toolkit, including the home tab. Learn how.

Published by Tudor Girba 4 October 2020

Glamorous Toolkit at strumenta.community

I had the pleasure of giving an interactive session for the strumenta.community about how Glamorous Toolkit is built as a language made out of interactive and visual operators.

Published by Tudor Girba 12 September 2020

Working with Git from Glamorous Toolkit

A screenshot rich tutorial on how to use Git from Glamorous Toolkit.

Published by George Ganea 2 September 2020

Optimizing for happiness on the Greater than Code podcast

Episode 193 of the Greater than Code podcast (1h13m) features a conversation with Tudor Girba covering a wide spectrum of subjects ranging from optimizing for happiness to the power of storytelling and our privilege and responsibility as developers.

Published by Tudor Girba 4 August 2020

Discovering Coder shortcuts

One of the first question people ask when starting with Glamorous Toolkit concerns the list of editor shortcuts. Indeed, these shortcuts are not yet visible in the user interface. Still, we should be able to learn these shortcuts from the system itself.

Published by Tudor Girba 4 August 2020

Glamorous Toolkit v0.7.1214 beta

Glamorous Toolkit is now beta.

Published by feenk 23 July 2020

Make it work, make it right, make it fast

Over the past several weeks we spent a significant amount of effort on improving performance. The work affected the whole stack, and now we have results to show for our effort.

Published by Tudor Girba 21 July 2020

How to edit documents with Documenter

A short overview of how to edit and manipulate documents with Documenter.

Published by Tudor Girba 7 July 2020

Code comments as live wikis in IDEs

In this article we explore how code comments can become a live wiki if we rely on interactive notebooks to document our systems directly inside the IDE.

Published by Andrei Chis 7 July 2020

Glamorous Toolkit and Pharo

Glamorous Toolkit is built in Pharo, and it enables people to work with Pharo systems. Nevertheless, its goal is distinct from that of Pharo and so is its realization.

Published by Tudor Girba 6 July 2020

XDoc: executable documents

XDoc stands for eXecutable Document and it is a generic container for various types of documents.

Published by Tudor Girba 6 July 2020