Archive

We’ve been busy.

After months of planning and hard work from the amazing Stately team, we’re excited to finally release the new Stately Viz.

State machines are awesome.

They’re a really useful model for complex logic, workflows, processes, statuses, really anything that models state changes over time due to events, which happens to be most of your app logic.

They also happen to be one of the oldest models of computation, going back to the 1950s (when Mealy and Moore published their state machine concepts). In fact, computers and electronics really wouldn’t exist without them; they’re fundamental.

Over quarantine, I’ve been slowly working on something that I’ve wanted to exist for a long time.

There are so many tools that help us inspect logs, events, and even state in our applications, and many of us rely on these tools to put the pieces together and make sense of what’s going on in our application. But that’s not the whole picture!

What I feel is important is understanding what can happen in any given state. We should be able to visualize the logic and behavior of our apps as they’re running.

It seems like every time some big software-related issue hits international news, there is almost always some state-oriented aspect that hints at how it was caused, and/or how it could have been prevented.

Last year, I wrote about the serious FaceTime eavesdropping bug and how it could be avoided by making implicit state machines explicit, or in other terms, just making sure that nothing unexpected can happen in any given state. And the recent Twitter hack was likely caused by some social engineering attack vector (humans, after all, are the weakest link).

I want to talk about race conditions.

And I don’t just mean race conditions in the software sense, but the issue of bias based on race and other factors in software, and how these human issues can affect something as small as a logical error, to something as big as how an entire application can adversely affect groups of people.

Welcome to the very first issue of the Stately Newsletter! I’m really excited to begin an open, thought-provoking discussion on how we manage state in the ever-evolving, modern software and web ecosystem.

Who am I?

My name is David (@davidkpiano). I created , so I’ll share a lot of progress on XState and related tools here (there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes). I work at Microsoft, so I have to wear many hats in a few different languages (JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C#, Scala, etc.) and work on different projects with all sorts of complex data- and state-related problems. I’m also passionate about animated, interactive user interfaces, so expect me to talk a lot about that, too.