[[!meta title="Bookclub tapas"]] [[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2025 Maddie Sullivan"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2025/info/bookclub-tapas-nav)" raw="yes"]] # Bookclub tapas Maddie Sullivan (she/her) - IRC: ElephantErgo, , [[!inline pages="internal(2025/info/bookclub-tapas-before)" raw="yes"]] I've been experimenting with a new programming methodology that I've stumbled upon. I call it "Bookclub Tapas". It is comprised of two parts, "Bookclub" and "Tapas". Together, they form a literate-inspired, Agile-inspired development method which centers around developer self-reflection as a means to chip away at identifying powerful custom-fit abstractions. Bookclub turns literate programming on its head by having the target audience of the source document's commentary be its own developer. Bookclub files contain source code, issue tracking, research, feature requests, and reflections on the development process all seamlessly integrated into a single file. Developers no longer have to worry about keeping track of what they want to be doing, why they want to do something, or even the full picture of how to go about doing something, because the Bookclub file acts in cooperative conversation with the developer as a living record of their hopes, intentions, and efforts. Tapas is the idea that instead of writing stand-alone programs, we write library ecosystems. Instead of getting ahead of ourselves by trying immediately to write large programs to solve large problems, we instead focus on writing abstractions that reduce the scale of our problem. Our goal is to identify what sort of tool would make the problem at hand trivial to solve, implement said tool, and even work recursively to implement tools to implement our tools. Our goal is that each next level of abstraction is roughly a three-line trivial case of the level of abstraction below, and eventually the solution to our initial problem is itself trivial. Over the course of the talk, I intend to dive into what is Bookclub, what is Tapas, what do they look like when used together, and why they provide a meaningful set of methodologies both for getting real work done and also elevating the programming process' beauty. I will use a live demo centered around light development on a real-life yet-to-be-released Emacs Lisp package. I intend to showcase how Org Babel enables Bookclub by allowing for incredibly malleable documents that seamlessly integrate source code, documentation, issue tracking, research, and even the build process. I also intend to showcase how the Emacs Lisp macro system enables Tapas by allowing us to recontextualize and reinvent syntax in order to build powerful, composable abstractions that do exactly what the context calls for while using phrasing that is both natural and intuitive. About the speaker: Hi! I'm Maddie Sullivan, my pronouns are she/her, my handle is ElephantErgonomics (ElephantErgo on IRC), and my email is hello@ElephantErgonomics.com. My talk is on a programming methodology I've stumbled into that I've come to call "Bookclub Tapas". It's inspired by literate, agile, and last year's Emacsconf! I've had great success with it for my personal development process, and I'm hoping you can get something out of it as well. I'll be laying out what it is, how I found it, why Emacs makes an awesome environment for it, and how you can get started with it too! [[!inline pages="internal(2025/info/bookclub-tapas-after)" raw="yes"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2025/info/bookclub-tapas-nav)" raw="yes"]]