November 11th, 2024

Today was mostly a social day. I spent the day downstairs working more collaboratively with others. A couple of highlights of my day:

I had a chat about emacs keybindings in GTK
I had a long chat about education and about the tension that grades put both educators and students under. I was able to share some of how Khan Academy thought about tough tradeoffs
It was the first meeting of the Nature Of Code book club! I gave a little explanation of my understanding of how perlin noise works

I also did the tiniest bit of pair programming on a p5 error.

First Meeting of Nature of Code

We talked about the first couple of chapters! One thing I noticed was that most folks aren’t especially interested in p5 JS (a couple have an almost-allergic reaction to it). Most people want to steal from the ideas in the book but not the specific tools.

Other graphics thing

Presentation

I’m officially signed up for a presentation. eek!

Secret thoughts

Things learned:

There is no hit detection in p5. Want to tell if a button has been clicked? Do it yourself?
There’s no way to directly rotate things in p5, so the way to work around that is to translate the coordinate system with an angle and then draw the image, then rotate back

  for (const g of gummies) {
    push();
    translate(g.x, g.y);
    imageMode(CENTER);
    rotate(g.rotation);
    image(gummy, 0, 0, g.size, g.size);
    pop();
  }

The important thing is making sure the image is drawn at 0,0 because that’s where the translation has moved to.

Emac keys in GTK apps

From a conversation this morning. GTK can set emacs keys and they apply throughout GTK apps:

The config goes in ~.gtkrc-2.0

gtk-key-theme-name="Emacs"

End of day!

Today was a very social day (in a great way!) I had a conversations about The Nature of Code, Perlin Noise, and the tension that grades puts both learners and educators under.

I did write a little code. I wrote a sketch for randomly filling the screen with watermelon gummies. https://creative.nicole.computer/presentation-friend/watermelon-gummies/

There aren’t too many interesting ideas but I did play with rotation in p5 and implement buttons (which means doing hit testing myself because p5 doesn’t have buttons built in).

I’m working on a presentation for Thursday and I don’t want to spoil it but I’m super excited. It’s about randomness and it’s a playful story.

Notebook page for the day: https://notes.nicole.computer/daily/2024-11-11

Tomorrow

I made myself a timetable for the week. I’d like to attend the JS Group and the Missing Semester group tomorrow. Butttttt I’m noticing that one thing per day is pretty good and I start to feel more scattered if I try to attend more. I might just do Missing Semester?

I want to volunteer some kinds of conversations I’m open to, if you want to have coffee and chat, we could schedule 30 minutes and talk about any of the following (or other things):

Education and EdTech. I worked for 9 years at Khan Academy and worked on the learner practice tools for my whole time (helping learners practice skills with little quizzes). I’m happy to talk about what I did or just education in general.
Notetaking. I keep notes in Obsidian and sync them to notes.nicole.computer. If you’re interested in how I do that or want to talk about how notes can be useful or tell me your about your system then YES!
Exploring different positions in tech. I’m a generalist. I’ve had the worked as an engineer on the frontend including pretty complicated JS systems (Khan Academy has one of the oldest React codebases outside Facebook and it was my home base for years), backend work (I’ve worked in Rails, Go, and a tiny bit of python), mobile engineering (I’ve shipped code for 3 different companies in Objective C, Swift, and React Native ). I was also a tech lead / team lead for about a year. And I’ve also worked as junior designer and a technical project manager. If you want to chat about different positions and what those are like I’m up for it!

I know sometimes conversations can feel intimidating- we could take a walk or doodle next to each other (both of which can be nice if lots of eye contact is not your fave- me either).