Kartik Agaram
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akkartik.name
Kartik Agaram
@akkartik.name
750 followers 78 following 180 posts
Programmer building programs that are useful, easy to install, easy to run, easy to modify, easy to share. https://akkartik.name/freewheeling-apps
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akkartik.name
Literate programming with a little bit of spatiality
Prose about and code for the game of snake laid out in nested boxes/centers over a white background.
May 21, 2025 at 8:12 PM
akkartik.name
> Conceptually unified — not a “stack”.

Heh, I actually drew out the stack under my app recently.

A conceptually unified experience is lovely when everything is working.

But when things break, it's lovely to know the sub-components you depend on and their relationships.

The key is parsimony.
Title: Your context A vertical totem pole of the following rows: arrow: you are here Lua Carousel LÖVE Lua Operating System The nature of human beings Reality
May 12, 2025 at 7:54 PM
akkartik.name
Lua Carousel, the app for lightweight programming on computer or phone, now comes with comprehensive online help:
* A tutorial for programmers
* Exercises for learning programming
* Example programs you can run, clone and remix
* Reference documentation

akkartik.itch.io/carousel
May 12, 2025 at 4:31 PM
akkartik.name
Here's a picture I made as I listened to your scenarios, in case it helps.
March 17, 2025 at 1:22 AM
akkartik.name
Practicing graphical debugging using too many visualizations of the Hilbert curve

akkartik.name/debugUIs.html
February 1, 2025 at 12:30 AM
akkartik.name
Infrastructure for debugging: a 4-minute talk (audio/video) with a nice transcript for the bandwidth-constrained.

akkartik.name/post/2025-01...
January 21, 2025 at 5:05 PM
akkartik.name
You didn't ask me, but I've been building some text-first UIs atop a graphical canvas:

git.sr.ht/~akkartik/pe... (instead of left-lines of text that scroll down, each command from a palette appends a column of notes to the right)

git.sr.ht/~akkartik/dr... (unconstrained infinite 2D surface)
January 13, 2025 at 7:30 AM
akkartik.name
Circle packing

Thanks @ronikaufman.bsky.social for the inspiration (bsky.app/profile/roni...)

akkartik.itch.io/carousel
paste.sr.ht/~akkartik/ce...

merveilles.town/@akkartik/11...
Piet Mondrian, "Composition A" (1923) drawn using just circles. The borders don't really work; the black background accidentally helps improve the effect. Robert Delaunay, "Rhythme, Joie de Vivre" (1930) drawn using just circles. This one's my favorite. Vincent van Gogh, "The Starry Night" (1889) drawn using just circles. Impressionism really stresses this approach.
January 4, 2025 at 12:25 AM
akkartik.name
Meme of grownup sitting around a fire with little kids listening: "Yes, we lost democracy and the internet, but for a few glorious years we had lots of think pieces about why Kamala Harris lost the election."
November 7, 2024 at 12:44 AM
akkartik.name
Coming up with a paper notation for kids so they can think about programming without filling up short term memory with irrelevancies like the order to put numbers in.

(As is often the case these days, I'm sketching this on akkartik.itch.io/carousel while lying in bed with my phone.)
A screenshot of Lua Carousel showing a mock-up of a new notation, how I imagine it is equivalent to textual function calls, and the result of running the textual calls on a computer. To draw a rectangle I need to specify the x and coordinate of the top-left corner, and the width and the height of the rectangle. So the idea is to make those numbers labels on a picture of a rectangle. Crucially, the picture is not to scale. Multiple rectangles aren't going to be positioned relatively, we're just going to put them one below another like a sequence of instructions. We're going to be drawing these pictures with pencil, and we don't want to get too hung up on realism. It's still just a notation.
July 1, 2024 at 1:04 AM
akkartik.name
A charting library you can paste into your phone or tablet. Quick and dirty, covers around half of gnuplot's chart types.

akkartik.itch.io/carousel/dev...
Screenshot of Lua Carousel showing a two overlaid scatterplots, one in blue and one in red. Screenshot of Lua Carousel plotting two time sequences of data using lines. Screenshot of Lua Carousel plotting a data set using ellipses of various positions and major/minor diameters. Screenshot of Lua Carousel plotting a bar chart with errorbars.
February 24, 2024 at 1:16 AM
akkartik.name
A voice recorder you can tweak the source code for, right on your Android phone.

akkartik.itch.io/carousel/dev...
December 18, 2023 at 11:13 PM
akkartik.name
All the upsets in the Cricket World Cup so far finally got me to build this tool I've always wanted. #cwc

git.sr.ht/~akkartik/cr...

It's not much to look at, but does the job for me. And if you don't like something -- you can make changes while the app is running! See archive.org/details/akka....
Demo showing an app for an all-play-all tournament cross-table. Click on the minesweeper-inspired buttons to toggle the winner of each contest. Click on the 'Total' column header to sort rows and columns by score.
October 19, 2023 at 2:29 AM
akkartik.name
You can now quickly make any app end-user-programmable -- as long as it's built in LÖVE

forum.malleable.systems/t/adding-mal...
Screenshot of a text editor showing a little LÖVE app, and a "Run" button below it. Screenshot showing the running app: a blank screen with a single number in poor contrast -- which increments with every mouse click. Press any key and you're back in the text editor.
August 22, 2023 at 6:37 PM
akkartik.name
Hi there Twitter, how you doin'. Love the new logo. I particularly love the multi-year guerilla marketing campaign for it. It's the first thing I click on every time I visit you!
July 24, 2023 at 4:53 AM
akkartik.name
Image maps are pretty cool. Particularly when https://www.image-map.net exists.

http://akkartik.name/freewheeling#resources

The only issue: links use absolute coordinates. So can't be resized.

Thanks @khinsen.bsky.social for suggesting linking to all the repos in one place.
Image showing a bunch of rectangles. Screenshot of image-map.net UI for mapping rects in the image to different links.
May 24, 2023 at 5:10 AM
akkartik.name
April 30, 2023 at 4:00 PM
akkartik.name
Drawing a family tree for the kids using this new tool I made.

https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/snap.love
April 22, 2023 at 4:45 PM