A General Update on Code Doodling

Doodle Code is my “knitting” project, where I dabble in programming while watching TV or during family gatherings (hey, it works for my family), and I haven’t had any really goals, so I haven’t had a point to stop and update. It also turns out I’ve been a bit forgetful and messy, but oh well. Now seems like time to dust it off and share it with anyone who’s interested, even if it's not the repository of useful teaching code I'd thought it might be originally.

Can you tell I'm a programmer who did most of his learning in the late 90s and early 2000s?

There are about 15 doodles, in various states of completion. Dunking on the dumb mathematical things sports casters say has been a bit of a theme and beyond that playing with colours. Everything else is things I thought would be interesting or just stuff I’ve been meaning to do (like the Coding Train Challenges).

I’d drifted away from doodling for a while, so back in February I thought it was time to start again. Then I came to the realisation that basically nothing was organised, documented or finished. I’ve started poking at that, but as it turns out it’s more fun to do new things than it is to go and clean up my own mess.

Github is always good for that endorphin rush of numbers go up.

Each doodle now has at least a description and a Readme, some are better documented than others, but that’s a starting point. I’m trying to strike a balance between working on new stuff and cleaning up what’s there so that it might be useful for someone else at some point. It may not be good for my existing habit of not getting stuff done, but I’m honestly feeling quite happy doodling around with stuff and I’m not feeling that compelled to “finish” anything. I am slowly learning to unlink my feelings of self-worth and happiness from productivity and I must say it’s quite refreshing and the project is leaving me feeling pretty good even if it may not be that actually useful.

Project 21 - Code Doodle - Introduction

 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.