Coding, creatives, and conversation.

Week 2

The second week of our studio Programming as a Design Tool, started with us exhibiting our conversational agent demo videos. I expected this to be like yet another exhibition we had in our Foundation year, but the experience was so different. When we showed our work to the Masters HCD students, we received some very insightful feedback, some that we had anticipated but also some that hadn’t even occurred us. They pointed out loopholes in security, compatibility, and scalability that questioned the future and practicality of our agent. I think these really helped us gain an external perspective, similar to a user’s perspective, and thus helped us to think of both minute details and larger concerns.

Other than this, the second week let us explore coding in a deeper manner, as we learned more commands on Cygwin and eventually switched to using Python on an editor like Atom. Using Atom really changed the entire experience of coding for me. Just the visual cues it gives, in terms of organizing the code using colors and automatic indentation, made the process easier, understandable, and weirdly more fun. Initially I thought it would be the same but somehow typing out an entire code for a particular purpose at once, and then running it and seeing it work the way you wanted it to is pretty sublime. It’s also a different experience to see the back-end and front-end of the same code, to see how a simple login page takes 20 lines of code. This bit was especially mind-blowing, it really put into perspective how long big websites with multiple features like Facebook must have taken to code. I couldn’t even fathom the magnitude of it.

Figuring out how to combine all the functions we earlier learned in an isolated manner, to make features of our conversational agents really made me think of the different possibilities we could explore. It really seems limitless, like these multiple combinations have infinite potential. I’m really looking forward to figuring out innovative ways of using this knowledge and making our agent a reality.

The relation between Python and Monty Python was a really curious bit of trivia that made me laugh and marvel at just how obsessed the creator was.