Old College Work: Programming
In college, I was intrigued by computer programming, but intimidated by Computer Science classes. I was never great at math, and those things sounded MATHY.
Fortunately, my graphic design-centric major offered their own programming courses that were a little more my speed. I took four in total: two on web programming and two on interactive programming, the latter of which utilized a Java-based language called Processing.
I loved these classes. To me, programming is the perfect union of the left and right halves of the brain. It takes a certain amount of creativity to determine the best way for a machine to accomplish a task, and because much of programming requires you to reflect “okay, what am I actually trying to do here,” you are constantly reassessing your goals, which leads to stronger work.
Invade
This was a fun one, and TOUGH. Our assignment was to make a game in Processing that could be described in one verb. The object is to maneuver the walls to protect your king (the gray dot) from invaders that spawn after a timer expires.
I have no idea how to do AI programming, but it was a fun challenge trying to figure it out! Also, this was before tower defense games were all the rage, so for the record I TOTALLY STARTED IT.
PollVault
This is a project I did with a couple of classmates, Wayne Fan and Chelsea Cropper. They did the front-end (made it look pretty), while I did the back-end (made the sucker WORK).
The back-end is PHP and MySQL, which I really enjoyed using. Database programming scratches a certain “efficiency itch” for me that I don’t really get anywhere else.
Icefall
This is an interactive visualizer I made using Processing. Each visual element responds to a different audio frequency. This video is from a live performance I did in Los Angeles.
This one was also super tough. I barely had a handle on Processing in TWO dimensions. The music is “Icefall” by Nobukazu Takemura. I think it sounds like Bomberman music.