As you know if you’ve talked to me for more than 5 seconds in the past 6 months, I’ve been working on slime mold simulations. One of my goals recently has been to specify all the behavior of a simulation in a config file, which will let me both re-create a given simulation, and will also let me script simulation behavior to tweak parameters in a systematic way.

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Yesterday, I wrote a tiny class to make it easier to create actor-based programs in p5. I’ve written some variant of this code about half a dozen times in the past few weeks and I realized it was a little silly to keep re-writing it.

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One of my favorite things at Recurse so far has been the weekly “Creative Coding” meetup. Every week a group of about half a dozen of us get together and spend about 90 minutes writing code to respond to two randomly selected prompts. For instance, last week one of the prompts was “tech support” so I wrote a thing that creates a Markov chain from the longest Outlook FAQ I could find, and used that chain to build nonsense tech advice. Other people made very clever animations and even interactive games; it’s really amazing what can be done in 90 minutes!

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A Narrative Journey

Like the rest of the Internet I’ve been enjoying playing Wordle for the past few weeks. While playing it I started thinking about good ways to approach the game, which of course led writing a computer program.

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A few years ago, when I was teaching interview training classes at Etsy, my co-teacher Tim came up with a great metaphor to describe the goal of an interview: by finding the bounds of a candidate’s knowledge, you’re discovering the shape of a “lumpy potato” that describes their knowledge. Every candidate’s potato is unique, and your job as a team of interviewers is to discover the shape of that potato. No individual interviewer can find the whole, but you put your slices together after the panel of interviewers and get the whole potato.

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First, let me get this out of the way: I’m having trouble writing about anything practical or work-related with everything happening with COVID-19. I’m worried about my family, I’m worried about my friends, I’m worried about neighbors and anyone vulnerable. But this seems like a small, topical thing I can contribute to that might make a narrow sliver of people’s lives a tiny bit easier.

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