As I've mentioned in my last few updates I'm starting to get a little bit more done on some of my *other* projects. Despite my best efforts though, some of those projects are big, and hard to finish and they need me to learn things, even when I think I've kept them small.
The solution to that is *clearly* to start doing something else as well. Because spreading myself thinly has really been a key to my success.
Oh.
Right.
No, it's definitely the other thing where I'm not great at finishing things and it's easier to play with the new shiny thing than it is to get shit done.
That being said, I am starting a new project and I have a bunch of ideas whey I think it's a good idea.
Ok Fine. I'll bite, what are you doing?
I'm writing a bunch of tiny programs. They may help me do other jobs or they may just be things that seem cool to play with. Basically, I want them to be simple, easily completed, code doodles.
You Mentioned You Had Ideas as to Why This Wasn't a Bad Idea
Aha. Actually I said I have ideas as to why this is a *good* idea. Take that, Scalziesque interlocutor!
Still.
The biggest reason I want to write tiny programs is that I want to write tiny programs. I don't write that many programs and programming is fun.Sometimes your brain is a little bit on automatic and you want to engage it just enough to to have done something. It's knitting basically. Programming, fun times.
The second reason is that I'm working on *another* project, related to teaching people to code and I think one of the things we do very poorly when programming is teaching new programmers to read other peoples' programs. I've never had time when I'm teaching to get beyond the bare basics of what I need written for the students to work with, and so this seems like a great time to just build up a repository of interesting programs so that people can *look* at them at some point. In fact, at some point, I hope to have other people contribute interesting tiny programs too. (I don't know what that point is, so if you're interested in publicly sharing the code for a tiny program, drop me a line.)
The third reason is that there's a ton of things I still need to learn. Also there's a not insignificant list of things I've forgotten to a greater or lesser extent. And much as I hope Game Tracker will be great for teaching me, it's *already* too big and complicated for what I'd hoped to do for a lot of things and I need some places to play before I build those things.
The fourth reason is just to give myself practice finishing things. I'm bad at it. I've been bad at it for most of my life and so keeping the programs tiny seems like a good way to finish them.
The fifth (and for now final) reason is that it's a fun way to run into more interesting things I haven't had a chance to think about before. For example, how similar *are* the sets of {1, 2, 3, 4} and {3, 4, 5, 6}. So the fifth reason really ties the other together a bunch of the others in a way that should hopefully keep my brain moving.
So What Are You Doing?
I've made a GitHub repository and I'm uploading stuff there. No guarantees any of it's good or interesting (and if I've solved any of your intro to programming assignments by accident, (Sorry!) I'm not doing it on purpose. - Hit me up and we'll chat assessments in programming.) Feel free to keep an eye on it if that's the kind of thing that interests you.
So far I have 2 programs in the repo.
- List Difference - takes a look at two lists and lets you see how similar they are. It's intended to help statistically mock sports casters. This one's pretty finished.
- Food-o-rac-o-cycle - named for the food machine on the Jetsons (I think). This will tell me what to make for breakfast. This one's off to a good start.
I'm also planning to add a couple of other programs that I'm working on to help with the Chrono Sprites. I started them separately, but they fit the model for Code Doodling, so I'm going to drop them in too.
I'll update from time to time, but if you're interested in what I'm up to looking at the repository is probably the best place to see the latest.
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