Creative Programming

Twitter bots are all around. I love them. I made some, and I follow a lot of them. Some time after π-day (or pi-day) last March (it’s March 14th every year), I came upon the idea to create a Twitter bot that posts irregularly decimals of π. It starts, of course, with π and a lot of its decimals…

module.exports = '3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399';

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I’ve got this domain name already eleven years. Quite some different layouts have been here. Also, a lot of different content has been shown. Most of the smaller projects I’ve put online are located in sub folders of this root and are not referenced anymore. I had the idea to make a roundup, a cleanup and a blog post about some of them. Checkout out for example my Leetifyer!

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I decided, in advance of _If Hemingway Wrote Javascript_, to start rewriting parts of my own code. I was delighted to see the variaty of implementations of algorithms within the book. Wether it is a good or bad part of JavaScript that anything can be written in different ways, why then settle with the first result of my own coding? Why not give it another take?

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It was not a big surprise to read that Angus Croll is from the UK. Since he’s an employee of Twitter, my first guess was he’d be an American, but after reading a couple of chapters in _If Hemingway wrote JavaScript_, I found that hard to believe, since his vocabulary is more similar to the lists of words I had to learn in high school, than to what you regularly hear on Dutch television of US sitcoms.

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In my rondup of day one of Fronteers Conference 2014 I tried to touch most speakers at least briefly. For day two I want to do the same. As said, Fronteers 2014 is a well organised conference and one of high quality: speakers from Twitter, Google and Etsy are part of the line up. In addition to that it is held in a beautiful venue and a good lunch is served!

#fronteers14 @necolas: Building a web app without any components is like assembling a radio from… this. pic.twitter.com/kGPuJN4VyK

— Arjan Eising (@eising) 10 oktober 2014

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So I was looking forward to Fronteers14 since their first announcement and ticket sales last April. I was so much looking forward to it because I attended Fronteers13 also and I was very much impressed by the richness and amount of information you receive in such a short time span. That really is the up-side of visiting conferences.

The venue is as always a beautiful place to spend some time. The Tuschinski Theatre was built in the 1920s in the then popular Art Deco style. If you might get bored during a talk, just take a look around, you’ll see so much nice details: visually a very attractive spot.

#fronteers14 venue details pt. 2: "Toilet Dames Trap Af" pic.twitter.com/XUWL94u16i

— y-a-v-a.org (@_y_a_v_a_) 9 oktober 2014

Just days before the start, some speaker mentioned physical discomfort: feeling sick and/or having a cold, that I was hoping none of all speakers really would call off for the conference.

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Visiting the Gemeente Museum Den Haag — currently called Kunstmuseum Den Haag — I came across a painting I knew already for quite a while, and which I like very much, but now it triggered something. Looking at Vilmos Huszár‘s painting Compositie II (schaatsenrijders) from 1917, I saw, although being sober, the ice skaters move from spot to spot on the painting. I thought: wouldn’t it be great to animate this?

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Last week I was visiting Fronteers 2013 conference in beautiful Tuschinsky cinema in Amsterdam. At the conference, Paul Lewis had a presentation on browser rendering performance. He showed a slide which contained an animation that showed how a browser calculates and paints the screen. Some people on twitter were wonderin how this animation was created. It appeared to be a modified Firefox build. The visualization of paint events cought my interest and I was curious if it was possible to catch Chrome paint events and animate them myself.

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