Ben McChesney and Ellen Rockett recently discussed their findings on coding experiences within Dawes’ book. Ben started the discussion by describing how little things in life can influence one’s coding experience. For instance, Dawes had an old McDonald’s wrapper that intrigued him visually, thus inspiring him to create “McGoogle.” However, although this was a useless project for him, he still was able to learn heavily from the experience. Projects that had no practical use turned out to be great learning tools for Dawes, and he advised the reader to get inspired by outside sources and experiment with code, even if it does not relate to anything that’s currently being worked on.

Another project Ben discussed was a data visualization at the Los Angeles airport, in which Dawes used his webcam. Dawes noticed different patterns of people walking by him, which inspired this visualization. He set up his camera for a certain amount of time and used pixel values to visualize the data of the people walking by, once again making the point that anything in life can inspire a project.

The last point in which Ben made in his discussion was that changing only one or two variables within code can make a large difference in the outcome. He discussed a project about an endless spiral, in which the picture of the end result was shown, to help illustrate this point.

Next, Ellen began discussing different short examples of Dawes experimenting with code in the book. Some examples include how he used code to calculate the distance between two points, a website in which a sound clip plays as the user input moves closer to objects, a Batman visualization in which Dawes used letterforms to recreate images within the retro television show, and a visualization of movie frames. Overall, Dawes felt that as a developer, he notices things that he might find useful as he goes along in his everyday life and he decides to design software to accomplish these desires, which in turn, saves him time later on in his daily activities. For instance, he created software to save bookmarks for his vacation research, so that he did not forget to do so, which saved him time overall by not having to go back and research the same findings repetitively.

The discussion can be found on Team Growl’s Vimeo.

Team Growl Book Talk from Team Growl on Vimeo.