I Can't Paint
Shuzan's Staff
Shuzan held out his short staff and said, “If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?”
At 15, I discovered Daniel Shiffman's Coding Train, and it changed everything. His infectious enthusiasm made programming feel less like a technical challenge and more like an artistic adventure.
JavaScript, despite (or perhaps because of) its quirks, became my first programming language. While I now have a love-hate relationship with its peculiarities, back then it was pure magic, and p5.js opened up a world where your code experssed your creativity.
My early sketches were like a child's first drawings - messy, and unrefined. Each one represented hours of trial and error, moments of frustration followed by bursts of joy when something finally worked. Looking back, those "simple" projects taught me more about problem-solving and persistence than any tutorial ever could. And the struggle isn't over yet. Everytime I get stuck on some object oriented crap, I'm reminded of this song.
Anyways, here are three survivors from this experimental phase that still hold a special place in my digital archive:
1. Symmetric Draw
Click the image to make your own!
Imagine a digital kaleidoscope where every stroke of your cursor creates mirrored patterns across the canvas. It's deceptively simple - just a few lines of code - but watching visitors lose themselves in creating perfectly balanced designs never gets old. Some of the patterns people created were so beautiful that I started saving them, building an accidental gallery of collaborative digital art.
2. Penrose Tiles
Click the image to see the magic!
This was my white whale. An implementation of the famous aperiodic tiling system. This was my first foray into combining mathematical beauty with code, and the result felt magical.
3. Trigonometry
Click the image to see the magic!
A sketch where refreshing the window introduces random colors, and moving the cursor alters the flow. It's a reminder of how simple interactions can create dynamic experiences.
These projects might seem primitive compared to today's standards, but they represent something more important than technical sophistication - they're artifacts from when I first realized that programming could be a form of creative expression. While I've moved on to more complex technologies, these early experiments laid the groundwork for how I approach problem-solving.
Looking back, those hours spent in front of my screen weren't wasted. They were the foundation for the coder I am today. While I no longer write p5.js sketches or work as often in JavaScript, the lessons I learned during that time continue to guide me.