As mentioned last year, I’m working on a Artificial Intelligence that can do web design. It is called The Grid. Last week I gave a talk at Lift Conference explaining how it all works.

Exactly a year ago today we flew from Berlin to Tenerife to depart on a sailing trip across the Atlantic on the Finnish sail training schooner T/S Helena. The Grid had just reached 10.000 founding members, and it was time to charge batteries before the next big push towards the beta.

When I flew to Tenerife to sail across the Atlantic in late November, there was excitement in the air. Nemein — the software company I started in 2001 with Henri Hovi and Johannes Hentunen, and left later to build an AI-driven web publishing tool — was about to be sold.

It is now a year since our NoFlo Development Environment Kickstarter got funded. Since then our team together with several open source contributors has been busy building the best possible user interface for Flow-Based Programming.

Today I’m happy to announce the public beta of the Flowhub interface for Flow-Based Programming. This is the latest step in the adventure that started with some UI sketching early last year, went through our successful Kickstarter — and now — thanks to our 1 205 backers, it is available to the public.

I’ve spent the last three days in the GNOME Developer Experience hackfest working on the NoFlo runtime for GNOME with Lionel Landwerlin.

The c-base space station — a culture carbonite and a hackerspace — is the focal point of Berlin’s thriving tech scene. It is also the place where many of the city’s Ingress agents converge after an evening of hectic raiding or farming.

The idea of Full-Stack Development is quite popular at the moment — building things that run both the browser and the server side of web development, usually utilizing similar languages and frameworks.

We just opened the Flowhub website for pre-orders. Flowhub is the collaborative development environment for NoFlo and other flow-based programming systems.

Bitcoin — the decentralized digital currency — has been making a lot of headlines lately. Much of this is driven by the current investment boom around it that has raised the exchange rates over the 1000 USD mark. But really, looking at Bitcoin as a medium for currency or asset speculation is a bad idea. Instead, we should see it...