I've been building these for years. I think its a great entrypoint for new developers and can be incredibly useful at work for solving short term inconveniences or scripts that help automate some tasks.
I have a Vue3 started template I host at https://http://vue-template.spaghet.me/ and all I have to do is curl and I'm ready to go.
I crochet and weaving in loose ends / tying up works is the 90%, but I love making shit for myself every once in awhile and I can cut all the corners I want and just tie a knot and call it a day lol I feel you
I splurged on a iDraw H SE - A3/A2 earlier this year and have been coding / making birthday cards for friends and family all summer.
I feel like I get asked a lot the same questions and I think this article describes it best. Like yes I could have just upgraded to a nicer printer, but there is something fun about the process of getting an artwork plotted that makes it fun for me.
I need to upload some of my plots to share.
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On a similar note for others who want to get into this, there was a thread awhile back on "What is the 90% activity in your favorite hobby", for example sanding taking 90% of the time for woodworking. For pen plotting the 90-95% is the art side. Taking images, converting them into g-code either via SVG or other processes, or writing code to make generative art, that is the 90%.
At the end of the day the pen plotting itself at the surface level is a projection of the effort taken to generate the art. Where it gets really exciting is the capabilities and unique aspect of the medium (like touching on white ink or watercolor) that create truly unique ways of presenting the art.
This is so sick thank you for sharing. I do a lot of Go + DuckDB stuff. I’ve done some janky JS / html/template stuff for charting so this will be fun to play with
I am an avid discovery coder and was actually day dreaming an outline for a similar article on my way home on the bus today. I think this is an extremely important concept at all levels of engineering and something we all need to adopt at one point or another in our careers / practice.
I think it follows a few topics, "the art of the POC/Spike" or just exploratory coding. These things give us a tangible hands on approach for understanding the codebase, and I think lend to better empathy and understanding of a software system and less rash criticisms of projects that may be unfamiliar.
This is particularly relevant to me right now as I am discovery coding a fairly large project at my company and working with product to lay out design and project planning. Whats difficult to express from my current standing is how the early stages of these types of projects are more milestone / broad based rather than isolated small key pieces. Sure I can spend a week delivering design, architecture, epic, outline docs for all the known and unknown features of the project (and I am). But at the same time I need to discover and test out base case / happy path solutions to the core business problem to more accurately understand the scope of the project.
I think its something I particularly love about being a TL / IC at my company. I have the flexibility and trust to "figure it out" and the working arrangement to provide adequate professional documentation at the appropriate time. I am fortunate to have that buy in from leadership and certainly recognize it as a unique situation.
All that being said:
1. Learn how to effectively isolate and run arbitrary parts of your system for YOUR understanding and learning
2. Make it work, make it right, make it fast.
3. Learn to summarize and document your findings in a suitable fashion for your situation
4. Encourage this throughout your team. Useful in all aspects from bug triage to greenfield work
Notably you could quickly prototype something for the world cup using sport `soccer` and league `fifa.world`. Its awesome