Over the last few months I have been becoming more aware of the live coding world.
The first algorave that I went to was at Piksel Festival this year.
It was unreal! Improvised pieces, prepared pieces. Everything welcome and everything bringing something different.
I am writing this at a point where I think its unreal, but have not tried it out myself yet.
A web based tool for live coding music!
I've tried it for the first time this morning and this was the (scrappy fiddle) result
(Here are the two lines in case the link dies at some stage:)
$: n("[4*<4 1 2>] <6 [~ 6]> ~ 5").sound("jazz").scope()
$: s("cp hh sd hh").bank("<RolandTR909 RolandTR505>").fast(2).mask("<0 1>/2")
A web based tool for live coding visuals!
A web based tool for collaborating with others using Strudel, Hydra and some others.
I listen to far too much programming shite talk on the internet. Twitter opinions. YouTube opinions. Hacker News opinions. The whole feckn lot. I feel like I am constantly steered by it. Most of the shite talk comes from people with far more experience than I do and some of it is probably very valid. But also, who knows? It could be a load of useless nonsense.
Even if I can pull out the most truthful and wise morsels of signal from the noise, how good of a programmer am I ever going to be if I just parrot off what I have read online? Not very good probably. I'm about 2 questions away from not knowing what I'm talking about because I haven't done my own research.
I often feel guilty or ashamed for the things that I try out and work on. Guilty because it doesn't line up with what I've read someone say online. It's probably "wrong" or I am using "the wrong tool for the job" or that my architecture is not solving the problem optimally or some shite like that.
I learned about ECS a few years back and wanted to try out the concept. However, throughout the experience I am reading tweet after tweet about why ECS is a waste of my time. The thoughts are again, probably valid, but then I get more decision paralysis when my brain starts telling me that I'm wasting my time. But the point is to learn about ECS and what is good and bad about it. Ignore Jonathan Blow and do your own research.
Recently, I have seen some cool things with using Ruby for game development and I want to try it but DragonRuby in particular seems to have some neat things going on (fast iteration time, hot reloading, neat live console, apparently Ruby is nice to write). But by even writing that I feel like I will be forever put in the game developer bin. Who on earth would make a game in a slow yoke like Ruby? But I'm going to hold fast and follow my enthusiasm. Maybe it will lead to a new world of productivity. Or maybe I'll find some dealbreaking cons for me. Whatever happens, I'll have reached my own conclusions.
This little piece is a reminder to myself that its OK to go do the stupid thing. I'll learn my own way, using real experiences to form opinions and build my preferences. And who knows, maybe that will lead to some other discoveries that online ranters aren't going to see because they are too busy (Jonathan) blowing hot air up each others arses.
Feck Jonathan Blow for his know it all rants condescending on us all as if we are thick eejits. I'm still going to listen to the bollix because he is class but I am also not going to feel bad for trying out what he thinks is stupid. I'll learn me own way what works best for me and if I learn from experience why something doesn't work, then that's also class and I now have another bit of tested knowledge in the bank.
Dog bless
(Created 9th April 2024)
Recently, I have been going down all sorts of rabbit holes. The Indie Web, Gopher, Gemini, Solar servers, Programming languages like Forth, Uxn and Joy, microcontrollers and loads other things. These all pull me away from the things that I should be working on which makes me go "ahhhh!" but they all seem so exciting in the moment (and I realise how boring this all sounds)!
I was trying to take a step back and figure out why I get so enthusiastic about these topics which lead me to come to the list of objectives up above.
I feel like the direction of most modern technologies is moving in a way that is opposite to almost all of these objectives. We are losing control over our software and hardware. Software and hardware is becoming needlessly complex. Our software and hardware is very quickly becoming obsolete. It's important that we push back against this and be in the driving seat of the technology we use.
When I go into these rabbit holes, instead of coming out of them and losing whatever I find to the ether, I would like to document what I learn and share them in case others find anything interesting in them.
All the best