Mary Rose Cook

It has been said that a novel user interface idea is not a durable differentiator for a product. The cycle is like this. An idea is conceived and integrated into a product. It provides value to the users of the product, and, initially, brings market differentiation and success to the product. But then it’s copied into other products and the...

I used to believe that every book has an objective value. And I used to believe that this value is fixed and universal. Now, I believe it’s much more useful to say something in this form: this book has this value to this person in this context. For example, Mindset by Carol Dweck was life changing to me when I read it in 2016. The “me” part is...

I made an Apple Shortcut for ChatGPT. I use it on my: Apple Watch - “Hey Siri, talk to GPT”. Mac - run the shortcut and type into a text box. iPhone - talk or type. You can use this shortcut too! Get an OpenAI API key. Install the shortcut by visiting this link on your Mac or iPhone. Enter your API key. Privacy The API key will remain...

Programming environments Code Lauren - An online IDE for beginners. Includes a vm that lets the user run their program forwards or backwards. Watch a demo or try it out. Isla - A livecoding interface and programming language for young children. Games Pistol Slut - A platform shooter. Guns, grenades, parallax scrolling, particle effects. The...

See the books I’ve read on GoodReads. My bookshelves:

I set up my GPT-3 account so I can text with it over SMS. It’s pretty fun. To build this, I combined Airtable and Twilio. Here’s how it works: I text my query to a Twilio phone number. E.g. “What is a good thing to reflect on as I fall asleep?” Twilio receives the text and sends a webhook with the query to Airtable. Airtable receives the...

I was interviewed on the Future of Coding podcast. It was a really fun conversation. We talked about: My work at Airtable helping build tools for non-programmers to make software to do their work. Making software without writing code. GameMaker, an amazing environment for creating games with minimal code. It has been used to make killers...

I wanted to get a better intuition for exponential growth. So I made this exponential explorer. It lets me directly manipulate the starting amount, growth rate and number of periods of a graphed exponential. I can create multiple graphs and overlay them or compare them side by side to see the relative effects of the different factors. I can...

Use Step to get a more precise understanding of how code executes. You see a code listing. You click on the part of the code that you think will execute next. Then you click on the part of the code that you think will execute after that. And so on. This is just a proof of concept. You can’t enter your own code, but I plan to change that. Try...

My new talk. No maths, no code, no slides.