In our most recent assignment we are tasked with reading through other people’s sketches and commenting out the code. This is an excercise that I’ve never done before but it is definitely beneficial to improving my code literacy, my ability to read code that is. From an experiential standpoint I had some trouble in the beginning but was quickly able to follow a system that allowed me to chunk down the code, to seperate it into larger sections and then relate that to different things in the sketch. It was usually within these larger sections that I had more trouble with some of the functionality of the code. Eventually I figured out that I should search things I didn’t know and go through smaller example sketches to extrapolate the functions meaning.
Something else that I discovered (I think I already knew it the back of my mind) was that I really need to refresh my familiarity with more of the higher level math that I used to do. It was unfortunate that at the time I was learning trigonometry and calculus the push to code was nonexistent. While I enjoyed math at the time I was never shown the real world applications of it. The return to coding has renewed this interest in math, especially from a visual perspective. One sketch I found extremely beautiful and extremely math dependent is below. The ability to use multi-level arrays (matrices) to populate different layouts is very interesting!
P.S. This assignment also allowed me to prevent a sketch author to use my computer to mine for Bitcoin while I watched their sketch 😉