Onboarding/Vision.md

# Vision

Designing custom silicon is really challenging for a number of reasons, but
it doesn't have to be. The reasons for this feed into eachother.
Since chip manufacturing is incredibly expensive, the silicon design
industry as a whole is incredibly conservative and resistant to adopting
new tools and highly innovative design methodologies. Because the industry
is so resistant to innovation on the tooling front, capable young talent
that could make an impact in this industry often find careers in alternative
industries.

To address this problem, we're creating a platform that makes it a joy
to learn how to do custom hardware design. Joy Of Hardware. We're targetting
high-schoolers and young college students who have not yet been biased into
the current mindest on how to design chips.

Our platform will teach chip design using innovative tools and approaches
including Bluespec(allowing us to build IPs that "just work" when
snapped together with various compiler enforced guarantees), Haskell for
formal modeling, Yosys, and NextPNR(for hassle free syntehsis and place and
routing), and our own custom IDE with a built-in waveform veiwer.

# ReplIt, but for Hardware

Essentially, we're trying to make ReplIt, but for hardware. A user logs into
app.joyofhardware.com and is greeted by an IDE containing a code editor,
terminal, and, file browser pane. The user must create a `shell.nix`
and `default.nix` so that they can have reproducible builds. They
might for example work on an FPGA deisgn in Bluespec targetting
the Lattice ECP5. Below is a link to an example `shell.nix` and
`default.nix` that a user might write for their design.

<!-- Add link to `default.nix` from https://git.joyofhardware.com/Tutorials/bluespec-joh-template-->

The IDE drops the user into a nix shell session. If the user wants their
work to be persistent, they must commit their work to `git.joyofhardware.com`.
Once they've commited, they can visit their repo on git.joyofhardware.com
and click, "Open In JoyofHardware", which would take them to app.joyofhardware.com,
start their IDE, and open their git repo. The terminal in the IDE would drop them into
the shell with packages available specified by `shell.nix`.

Right now, everything is hosted with co-location with very capable and powerful
infrastructure. More on this in [Architecture.md](./Architecture.md).

# Programming Hardware

The user can purchase their own FPGA hardware and program it through their browser.
We have proted OpenFPGALoader to work in the browser via webUSB which means that
it is possible to program FPGAs such as the Lattice ECP5 based ULX3S.

We may at some pont in time start manufacturing ULX3S boards at scale should user
demand grow.

# Tutorials

We will have tutorials that assume users have little to no knowledge on digital design.
Our aim is to give the user all the knowledge to eventually be able to design implement
a CPU on an FPGA that is capable of running the Linux kernel.

# Hardware Centric But Not Exclusive

This platform is hardware/FPGA first, but it doesn't mean that a user couldn't also simply
use JoyOfHardware for learning how to write standard software. The FPGA-first components of
the JoyOfHardware experience mainly stem from the fact that our online IDE has an integrated
waveform viewer as well as the ability to program FPGA from the browser.

# Low Cost

Becasue we make use of co-location, our monthly hosting costs are an order of magnitude
lower than they would be in AWS or GCP. As such, we can charge a fraction of the price charged
by other platforms such as ReplIt.


# Loading Times

The platform must feel snappy at all times! Every possible interaction should
always happen in a 10th of a second including page loads. Right now, it takes up
to 30s to load a GitHub codespace, and up to 15s to start a ReplIt session! This
is insane!!! We're writing our frontend in Elm and backend in Rust. Frontend IDE page
loads must be measured in KB. The average page load should never be more than 500KB.

In rare cases, I might make an exception for the maximum page load to be capped at
1MB.

# Next Gen IDE

Because the IDE we're building is so snappy in the browser, it also makes a good candidate
for being a desktop IDE. We will port the IDE to work with Tauri on the desktop. Fully packaged,
I imagine the download size of the desktop IDE might come in at just a few MB.

# Nix For Infrastructure

All of our servers are fully managed with Nix from remote deploy, to
re-configuration, to backup, to secret management.

Our entire stack is fully reproducible(down to the actual hash of all binaries
if built single threaded), and easily scalable. We even have Nix backup configuration
to config files and data, which could be re-deployed at a moments notice on new hardware.

The only configs nix doesn't backup are router and switch configs(whihc we commit to git
manually).