The idea of 100 shitty projects is to celebrate quality over quantity. For me, this resonated because it gives me permission to explore little things I’m curious about without thinking “Oh this needs to become an app, a product, or something that someone wants to use”. A more accurate description for me would be: 100 small projects. Because it’s really about exploring and learning.

When I first heard about this my initial thought was “What counts as a ‘project’?”. Even the idea of defining this reveals my perfectionist tendencies. When given an assignment in class, I fear straying from the rubric. But real life isn’t class and I can do whatever I want. And in the spirit of becoming a better programmer, I want to embark on projects with confidence even if they end in failure. Confidence to push through hard moments and know that I can do hard things.

But also in the spirit of finding the joy in coding again, I want to make things even if I don’t think they’re “technical enough” or “clever enough”.

The projects

Here is a log of anything I make in the spirit of fun, learning, whimsy, exploration etc.

1

11/12/24

Played with getting an arduino sensor (a potentiometer in this case) to send a signal to a p5.js sketch! I was brainstorming what this could hook up to and thought it’d be fun to also learn how to implement a phyllotaxis algorithm so I did that too.

2

11/17/24

Following along with Nature of Code book. When I showed the initial code to Z he immediately said “Oh why don’t the balls bounce against each other?”, so I tried to figure that out! This is quite innefficient though as each ball checks every other ball in the scene.

3

11/20/24

Joined creative coding at RC for the first time. This is week 3 but the other weeks I’d only shown up to see what people made. The theme for this week was “boring”. I feel like others interpreted this more as a boring result, and I was thinking more of a boring/simple setup/layout. My goal was to (in the spirit of “Impossible Day”) just build something with Three.js. Normally I would have thought this would take a long time but I got it setup super quickly using their basic demo and then just scaled it up to have a grid of rotating cubes.

4

12/4/2024

Playing with Three.js again. This time I ran out of time and had claude give me a rough draft and then I cleaned up from there. I don’t love this workflow yet, idk why. Doesn’t really feel satisfying, doesn’t scratch that “problem-solving” part of my brain.

Each octahedron is scaled and colored based on my sentiment on a given day at RC. I’m most interested in this data, didn’t love this way to represent it.

5

12/11/2024

Today the theme was end/beginning. This made me think of cycles, and then walk cycles. I was curious how to add a walk cycle in p5 so decided to try that! I drew everything in Procreate, style is “kindergartener sketch” featuring a daisy character I’ve been meaning to make a game with. Code sketch is here.

6

1/8/2025

Followed along with the Genuary prompt for today’s creative coding session @ RC. I was more curious about the idea of iterating a million times, so I made this text that moves as lifecycles progress. Technically this doesn’t iterate a million times though because I got impatient hehe so it’s stepping through 200 times and increasing the “lifecycle” by 5000 each time. Link to the sketch.

7

1/15/2025

The theme for today was “fabric/texture/weave” (or something like this, I don’t remember exactly). I decided to make a fabric-like texture in p5.js, my goal was for it look like a relatively open-weave fabric like a linen. Then I used that texture to create a “fabric” brush in Procreate!