This post was inspired by a tweet from Omar Rizwan:

i want to grow a program, like it's a plant that lives down in my browser console, and i take care of it and add to it over days and months and years

I love this metaphor and wanted to explore what it might look and feel like to play it out. What follows is a story about Alice, an avid user of a fictional writing app, and her experience growing programs within it.

Fertilizing

Alice's work involves a lot of writing, so much of her day is spent inside her favorite writing app.

As she goes about her work, she organically develops workflows which fit the way she thinks and works.

For example, she keeps an "Inbox" section at the start of each essay where she puts next steps, new ideas, and misc prose. She also keeps an "Archive" section at the bottom, where she moves sentences and paragraphs that she needs to cut but can't bring herself to delete.

This consistent structure in her essays (Inbox and Archive sections) and methods for handling certain types of text (new ideas and cut sentences), relieves some of the pressure of writing . She doesn't need to worry about where to put her nuggets of inspiration or agonize over cutting a sentence forever. She has a consistent system she can use to reliably handle these cases so she can focus her energy on writing.

But not only that. Programs thrive in environments with structure, so by adding some structure to her writing, she's also fertilizing the app for programs to grow.

Sowing

As time goes on, some of her workflows become core parts of her work. Especially the archiving workflow, which she uses many times a day. Although she likes having an archive of her cut sentences, she doesn't like how implementing it takes her out of the flow of writing.

She would love it if she could just select some text, hit a hotkey, and have it moved down to the archive section automatically. Luckily, the writing app supports end-user scripting, so she decides to try creating one for this workflow.

Alice has some experience programming, but never in this environment, so she decides to use the app's macro recorder to create the initial script. The result isn't perfect, but it only takes a few modifications in the app's built-in IDE to get it working.

With that, the seed of a program is planted! She assigns it to a hot key and gets back to your work.

Over the coming weeks, Alice creates many more scripts like this. None of them are very intricate, but they save her time throughout the day and allow her to focus on the writing itself.

Most of the scripts die off, while other's take root. This stage feels like sowing seeds. You can't count on any one seed to sprout so you need to plant lots.

Growing

The scripts require a bit of caring for - fixing a bug here, adding some logic there - but this is easy to do. The script's home is inside the app alongside her, so it's always right within reach. When there's an error, she gets a notification, and with one click she's dropped into a debug mode where she can step through and quickly track down the problem. Once fixed, there's no need to compile or deploy, the script is live within the app so changes are reflected immediately.

At some point, Alice notices that some of the scripts feel like variations of the same idea. All of them take a piece of text, and then quickly move it to another section or document. The writing app supports creating packages, so she decides to try refactoring these scripts into one.

She creates abstractions which span the specific use cases which her scripts implement, and encapsulates them in modules. She also defines the main interface for the package: some default actions like "move to archive", and "move to inbox", as well as an option to search and select any section and document as a destination. Once finished, using the package is as easy as selecting some text, right clicking, and then selecting an action from the menu.

Now, as she uses the package, she feels a shift. It took some time and care for her scripts to grow, but they finally feel like they've bloomed into the program that they were always meant to be.