This Week’s Program: Jan 25 - Jan 29

“My name is Jonas,” said the Blizzard as it dropped 26.8 inches of snow on Manhattan. Saturday in New York City was lovely. We should look more often for excuses to get cars off the roads, walk in the streets, and curl up inside with our loved ones, large amounts of bottled water, and a good book. Thanks for all you’ve shown us.

This week ended up being kind of a dud for writing code. I knew I needed to take a break from sonic-sketches to formulate what to do next. I felt what I guess you could call analysis paralysis. I have some idea of what I need to do next with sonic-sketches but couldn’t articulate a roadmap of action. I wanted to take a break and explore Elm and Processing a bit, but setting up development environments for new languages is 😖. I wanted to noodle on my personal website but didn’t feel a sense of inspiration. It’s a rut.

Escaping this inertia is the hardest part of any project. It’s why building a habit of writing code and keeping up this streak is important: filling those green boxes in GitHub means I’m moving in some direction.

Inspiration did appear throughout the week in a few ways:

• Indie Web Camp NYC and its principles.
• Joe Armstrong, the creator of Erlang and star of Erlang the Movie II: Outlaw Techno Psychobitch blogged extensively about his own experiments with programming music. Awesome.
• I attended my first Papers We Love meetup to see Ramsey Nasser talk through a paper that was wildly over my head.

Filled with a renewed sense of duty to computer, I’m going to outline my grand scheme for sonic-sketches for you now:

• I want to get the sonic-sketches program to a point where I can run it and it will produce a randomly created musical piece. This is why I’m investing time in learning both music theory and modular synthesis. I want it to sound good.
• I want to run the program on a daily interval, so I need to set up a server somewhere in the cloud and a crontab (maybe).
• When the program outputs a wav into s3, I want to set up an AWS Lambda trigger to upload that wav to SoundCloud.

That’s the plan. I’m really inspired by the #botALLY community and I intend for sonic-sketches to be my first foray into bot-making. It involves learning enough about music and synthesis to appreciate how to inject randomness into composition, and getting comfortable enough with Clojure and AWS to handle the operational complexity of running a bot.

I recently purchased two books: Amazon Web Services in Action and Docker Up & Running. Operationalizing software is crucial. It’s time I felt comfortable with the tooling.

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I added major modes for Elm and Processing to Emacs. I haven’t used them yet.

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Most of this week was about getting my Tumblelog POSSE system to support Photo-type posts and syndicating them to Tumblr. Mostly straightforward, but for images that I host, I post the binary directly to Tumblr.

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In sonic-sketches, I pull in a Clojure client to the Dark Sky Forecast API as a dependency of the project. I’d like to use this forecast data as input to some of the musical compositions. Next week, I’ll experiment with implementing this and what it might actually mean in practice.

Fresh out of batteries, but still making noise
– Mark