u/kentich

Hey, friends! I have a question to you: will you study together with your study partner via a video meeting through a virtual equivalent of physical frosted glass: with mutual visibility and mutual frosting? Turn your cam on to see others, and vice versa. Unfrosting is on a mutual consent. No creepy watching, seeing other's nose teeth picking, yawning, no feeling of being "on display". No feeling of isolation because you see other's frosted presence. Relaxed stess-free presence through such virtual frosted glass. Sounds interesting? I've built an app that does this and I'd appreciate your opinion.

Will you do something like a classmate group - a group video meeting to do homework together with classmates? I am not talking about an internet study group where people are hanging out together for focus and accountability. I am talking about getting together with classmates to collectively do homework together in real time via group video call.

Not via regular call, but via a video meeting through virtual frosted glass.

It is a digital representation of physical frosted glass:

• Mutual visibility: Your camera ON = See others. Their camera ON = See you.
• Cameras ON → You see each other through frost.
• Mutual frosting: Click to unfrost a participant → He confirms → You see each other clearly (or both stay frosted)

With virtual frosted glass you get:

• No creepy watching – everyone's equally visible and frosted
• Relaxed stress-free presence – you can be there without feeling stared at
• Spontaneous – just unmute mic to quickly say something from behind frosted glass

You can do homework together with classmates like that and don't feel like you want to turn this thing off just to get releief from tension and stress.

I hang out like that with my friend every day for a couple of hours using the MeetingGlass app.

Does it look interesting to you? Would you try it with your classmates or friends?

In my 15+ year programming career I always used mind maps in my coding practice. When I dive into a new project with an unfamiliar codebase, I analyze it by putting pieces of code directly into a mind map as nodes. Is anyone else here doing the same?

I copied and pasted code into a separate mind-mapping app (FreeMind). I found that to be extremely useful and productive. Seeing different pieces of code in different nodes of the mind map makes you hold those pieces in your mind simultaneously.

I've built a Visual Studio / VS Code extension to illustrate this approach to coding. It lets you jump to the linked code with a click on the node. For reference, the extension is open source and called Code Mind Map.

Happy to answer any of your questions!