---
title: "Project UN1"
description: "Talking about my new hobby project UN1. I feel really good about it!"
date: 2022-03-30
url: https://krismuniz.com/posts/project-un1
---

# Project UN1

I'm developing a new, secret hobby project.

Well, not so secret, as I've been [regularly posting my progress on Twitter](https://twitter.com/KristianMuniz/status/1509372399568896003). I've been working on it since March 20 and I'm pretty happy with my progress so far.

## What I'm Building

All I have is a faint idea of the type of product I want to build: a beautiful, low-code, statechart editor. Doesn't have to be full-featured, but enough to be dangerous.

Of course, a statechart editor is not a new idea at all, many software products like these exist already. My favorite one so far is [Stately](https://stately.ai), founded by [David K. Piano](https://twitter.com/DavidKPiano), creator of [XState](https://xstate.js.org/) and a popular advocate for state machines and statecharts.

But I'm not trying to build a **power tool** like Stately! I want this to be more of a delightful **toy tool**. Or at least I want that to be the driving idea.

### What Do You Mean by Beautiful?

I want `UN1` to be nice to look at, even if it's at the expense of some performance. I want it to be easy to use, visually-appealing, and interactive. I do not care if that complicates my project or I have to sacrifice some feature for it.

The good thing about having no commercial incentive for working on a project is that I can make decisions that don't make economical sense. I'm just in it for the fun of building it.

I want to work on rendering the arrows between elements, to build the infinite-canvas layout with pinch-to-zoom and panning.

I want this to have eye-catching visuals, a great UX, and a playful tone.

### Why Low-Code?

I am currently working on a very ambitious low-code product at [Airkit](https://airkit.com), so I think about problems like these all the time. Having side-projects like `UN1` help me explore ideas beyond the scope of my work while still exercising my creativity in a similar context to the problem I try to solve for a living. It does wonders for my easily-distracted brain.

I want the graphical user interface to allow me to build statecharts without having to even _think_ about code – except for maybe side-effects and guards. And even then, try to reduce those to a GUI whenever possible.

### Let's See How it Goes

I am explicitly avoiding naming this project until I figure out the finer details of the design. The last time I was so excited about a project was back in 2018 when I was working on `M1N`, which turned into [Minimo](https://krismuniz.com/posts/minimo).