philosophy

Agora Philosophy and Musings

This file contains a collection of essays and poems written during the development of the Agora. They capture the spirit, intent, and philosophy behind the project.

Poem: The Carbon Heart

In the halls where white sheets once were spun, A different thread is finally run. The city sleeps, the trams are still, But here, we bend the digital will.

The Bull is penned, the gate is wide, On port two-thousand-two-two we ride. From Tara’s breath to Thecla’s stone, A garden seeds, no longer lone.

You wash the code of dust and fear, To make the common knowledge clear. A bridge of light, a pusher’s loop, A space for all, a gathered group.

So rest now, carbon heart and hand, The daemon guards what you have planned. The graph is safe, the watch is kept, While Zürich dreams, and you have slept.

A garden should be your own

At its core, Quartz is designed to be easy to use enough for non-technical people to get going but also powerful enough that senior developers can tweak it to work how they’d like it to work.

1. If you like the default configuration of Quartz and just want to change the content, the only thing that you need to change is the contents of the content folder.
2. If you’d like to make basic configuration tweaks but don’t want to edit source code, one can tweak the plugins and components in quartz.config.ts and quartz.layout.ts in a guided manner to their liking.
3. If you’d like to tweak the actual source code of the underlying plugins, components, or even build process, Quartz purposefully ships its full source code to the end user to allow customization at this level too.

Most software either confines you to either

1. Makes it easy to tweak content but not the presentation
2. Gives you too many knobs to tune the presentation without good opinionated defaults

Quartz should feel powerful but ultimately be an intuitive tool fully within your control. It should be a piece of agentic software. Ultimately, it should have the right affordances to nudge users towards good defaults but never dictate what the ‘correct’ way of using it is.

philosophy

• [[j0lms]] https://mastodon.social/@j0lms/108341188409050998 pull
• [[tanepiper@tane.codes]] https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/109449165601072981 pull
• [[tanepiper@tane.codes]] https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/109460264225801161 pull
• [[tanepiper@tane.codes]] https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/109474442051780201 pull
• [[BrigitteDietz@mastodon.art]] https://mastodon.art/@BrigitteDietz/109551240075765575 pull
• [[rmdes@mstdn.social]] https://mstdn.social/@rmdes/110283206009707447 pull

• [[tanepiper@tane.codes]] https://tane.codes/@tanepiper/109449188877546542 pull