Tell the story behind your code. Use Poet to share and teach.

Poet is an interactive environment where you can mock quickly your ideas and explain them to others.

Poet has two sides. The first one provides a standard experience of writing JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The result of which could be seen in a HTML sandbox or console panel. The other side is the Story behind the code written on the first side. I believe that every piece of source code has value. Sometimes the things that we write has no or maybe bad impact but there is always something to learn.

While writing your code in Poet there is an option to persist the different stages of development. You are able to make commits with your current state of progress. Pretty much like we all do by using Git. Then later every commit becomes part of your Story. You can reference files directly so no need to copy/paste when something gets changed. Here is an example.

We may also consider Poet a publishing platform for web related articles. Everything is written in markdown and integrated with the Poet app which makes the blogging quite nice and painless. I did write couple of articles myself and I could say that the experience is much better then what I did so far. I'm usually going to a place to try my code, mock an example. Then I write the material locally on my machine and at the end I publish it somewhere. Now all these three activities are combined into one place - Poet.

How to use Poet?

There are couple of ways to use Poet. It depends of what you want to do. Here is a list of options which I think will meet most of your needs.

My favorite setup is a three column layout where on the very left one I have the editor and a console. In the middle I have the Story panel where I'm writing the article in markdown and on the right one I see the preview. Try it yourself here.

Check this 5 minutes video to get an idea how Poet works.