Code is Poetry (Screensavers Edition)

“Code is Poetry” is the slogan for wordpress.org. I’m a longtime user of wordpress software, and I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. Sometimes, after a long, hard day of coding at work, I go home and code some more, because I just have to see how something would work.

For example, back in the days of Windows 95 and Windows NT, there were some beautiful screensavers. But at the time, there weren’t many screensavers with interesting behavior. I wanted to see a little self-sustaining ecosystem: an aquarium where the fish would hunt and eat each other. So I wrote one. It is butt ugly. But it behaved exactly as I wrote it, and I couldn’t have been happier.

After a frustrating period of work, I wanted to punish the computer. So I wrote a screensaver to put the bugs in there to work. I made them perform a Sisyphean task of stacking balls that would later scatter, over and over again, forever. Butt ugly again. But I love it, it’s mine. I made it.

Code is my conduit from idea to reality. It’s essentially my modeler’s clay. It’s my art medium, and the medium has very exacting rules. Following the rules is difficult, but the results are so very rewarding. It is poetry.

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