Finding My True Creative Purpose Through the Revolution of Women Who Barely Have the Right to Exist

Over the next six months, I devoted my life to teaching everything I knew about programming and web development to these women. Most of them barely had a decent level of education — only a few had gone to university until they got married and started a family within the constraints of their religion. The English language was an issue for many, but with patience and time, they slowly got over their fear of judgment and became better at expressing themselves in a foreign language.

Read More
There Are So Many Ways Inspiration Can Hit You

When it comes to creativity, I don’t let myself believe too much in divine intervention. At least, not as a baseline for my life as an artist.

Sometimes, I think to myself that creativity might just be the ability to drag ourselves out of our invisible box and gather the courage to try new things — to go on adventures, to let go of our need for comfort, all that stuff. Maybe our only job as artists is to learn how to become emotional acrobats, jumping in and out of the unknown like superhero vigilantes inside the board game of Life, and see where that leads us.

Bottom line is, as a personal guideline, I prefer to think creativity comes from hard work, on ourselves, and on our Art. But I admit, there were times when inspiration came to me in a way that baffles me to this day.

Read More
Bytebeat: Hacking Your Way To Music One Byte At The Time

In its essence, a bytebeat program is a small C program consisting of an infinite loop, outputting to the terminal an endless string of ASCII characters. These chars can then be piped to another program and interpreted as raw audio output.

By influencing a variable t through bitwise operations at each loop iteration, we assure ourselves that the output of the formula will always be a different character, so different combinations of sounds will be heard.

Read More
Can Computer Programming Heal You?

[…] Learning computer programming forced my brain to think rationally, which I was completely unable to do. It provided me with the safety of right and wrong answers: your code either works or it doesn’t. This reality can be incredibly frustrating at times but for an artist like me, where there’s rarely this notion of right and wrong (in Art, rules are made to be broken and everything is subjective), the fact of having my computer give me the exact result of the code I’d written was, in a weird way, a huge relief.

Read More
Reconnecting With The Art Of Coding

Everyone has a dream of what an ideal job would be. For some, it’s working from home and having a healthy work-life balance. For others, it’s about being stimulated by continually learning new technologies.

Whether it’s curiosity, passion, recognition or even money, what drives you will shape this image of the perfect career and the perfect opportunity.

Read More
Merge Sort: How To Understand an Algorithm by Creating Music

Learning an algorithm can sometimes feel like learning a magic recipe. We understand the concept behind it, but understanding exactly how each step is done can be very confusing.

Live coding allows me to dive deep into the study of an algorithm by having fun with it and challenging my understanding and creativity. […] So today, we’ll dive deep into understanding how merge sort operates by building a Ruby program that uses this algorithm to create music.

Read More
Can a Creative Approach to Learning Programming Heal our Relationship With Technology?

Should creativity be an essential part of our learning process? Or does creativity have no other purpose than fun and entertainment? What are the possible benefits of taking a more creative approach to learning programming?

Read More