Category Archives: process

How the studying is going

Striped cat standing on the keyboard of a laptop

It’s been about a month since I came out of the closet as a desultory Python studier, and I’ve been thinking that I should have included in my plans a commitment to post about what I’m learning, at least once a week. I’ll try to do that, going forward. Less sweeping saga, more this:

I started this blog as a sort of “developer notebook”. If you look back at the first ten or so posts, they are titled “Weekly Noise”. I was interested in learning Node.js (the hotness at the time) so I just wrote about what I learned each week and what I was planning to do next week.
—Matt Swanson, “Do things, write about it,” August 11, 2013 Continue reading How the studying is going

PAPER SMELLS NICE I READ IT IN THE TUB

These are my cats, hanging out in the tub.
The following is the first draft of my thesis proposal, more or less as posted to ITP’s internal project database on Thursday morning. I wrote this in haste and have (still) not had the stomach to reread it, so be hereby forewarned that it may be incoherent, ridiculous, or, of course, both.

Thesis Statement

Every newspaper article on ebooks, in tweet form:
Article: ‘Ebooks might be okay?’
Comments: ‘PAPER SMELLS NICE I READ IT IN THE TUB’
—Liza Daly (@liza), 7:11 PM Dec 15th, 2009

Continue reading PAPER SMELLS NICE I READ IT IN THE TUB

Baby steps

grid of 61 colored squares

This is the second smidgen of the code for our final project. It pulls RGB values and color names from a tab-delimited text file (which is, itself, based on the actual Krylon color options) and outputs this grid of swatches. The swatches don’t do anything yet—just drawing them took me, like, two days, thank you very much, and that was with some very helpful help from Shawn. Partly this is because I apparently can’t keep in my head for more than thirty seconds how arrays and objects work, and partly it’s because I just. can’t. focus. And partly it’s because I apparently have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.

I’m beginning to really like Diego’s Plan B, as proposed over the weekend:

Fake our own deaths.

Continue reading Baby steps