Creative Coding

Abstract

I have a friend, Mark K., who was a web developer who had artistic yearnings (don’t they all). I met him a number of years ago when he enrolled in a 3D animation course I was teaching. Mark worked for a sizable, very businessy type company that will remain nameless, doing pretty dull programming. Mostly he was working on legacy code—stuff other people had written—and trying to keep things together with band-aids and string. On top of this, his company was outsourcing most of the interesting development work overseas, and Mark also had the fun job of trying to coordinate video conferences at all hours of the night (big time difference), while integrating their code (in a programming language/ development environment he wasn’t too familiar with) back into the company’s legacy spaghetti (disorganized and poorly structured) code. Is it any surprise Mark was pretty sour on coding and dreamed about painting rainbows and unicorns in the Elysian Fields? Well, actually it was more like working in the game industry. We met at the perfect time