Snow White, Part One

Snow White, Part One: Motivation.

I made a project. It's silly and wonderful. There are many parts and it had some restrictings which drove the decisions I made. Any project has restrictions, mine were sort of arbitrary.

1. As much of the project would be written in python as possible.
2. It has to fit in a briefcase so I can carry it through the airport.
3. It has to present well for a conference talk or a small group.

I'm going to write a series of blog posts about how I built this. This is the first of the series.

On Python

Python is my favorite language to work with. It's quick, it's stable, the community is wonderful. I build immersive worlds for a living at Nonchalance. Think along the lines of a museum installation, or an amusement park. That's a close enough approximation for these purposes. Python makes my job easy in a hundred different ways, and I wanted to show that off to the python community.

I proposed a talk. Moving backwards in time, a whole day ago, I gave this talk. I think I didn't do a great job showing off Python, I was mostly showing off. I think it made for a great talk, some other people did too, but I'm not sure I was explainatory enough to get ALL the stuff I wanted across. Also I only had 40 minutes and I showed 0 lines of code in my talk.

This series of blog posts exists to rectify this.

On the Briefcase

I brought up that this was an art piece for a conference talk. This conference was across the country. This proposes its own problems. On the way to the talk I was randomly chosen for TSA Pre Check, and I was carrying my wild device on, so it was nice that they didn't particularly care that I brought (very innocous) home-made electronics, and the tools to repair them should they be damaged in transit.

As I write this post, I've checked this briefcase. I've entrusted it's safe arrival back to my home in Oakland to Southwest Airlines. I'll update on its arrival in a future post.

On Presentation

From the reactions, I think this piece may have presented better to a group of 5-10 then a room of 40-60. This seems to be a function of restriction #2. You'll have to ask my audience for confirmation.

I do think that one particular part of it went quite well for a very large group (PyOhio Plays Tetris). If you weren't there, you'll need to stay tuned...

Post #2 is going to be about controlling the LEDs from python.

As always, email me your feedback! I love to hear from people who read my posts.

27th July 2014