![]() A tool that allowed me to move faster was therefore really helpful, even necessary-although it came with its own set of problems, especially around writing tests. Part of finishing this project was learning how to carve out time to make progress on my own ideas I required about four hours of good mental time a week. University, and later work, filled up my time with other people’s ideas and priorities. It’s a tool originally designed for artists, so it abstracts away much of the boilerplate. I used a framework called Processing because I was familiar with it from developing programming curricula, and because I knew it made it easy to create visual applications. You might think this would be discouraging, but by the time I got to this point I had learned many things that hadn’t come my way before - about color spaces and pixel manipulation - and I had started making those cool partially colored images, the kind you find on postcards of London with a red bus or phone booth and everything else in grayscale. The progression wasn’t as clear as I hoped, the dominant color extracted wasn’t generally the most appealing shade, the creation took a long time (a couple of seconds per image), and it took hundreds of images to make something cool ( Figure 11.1). That is when I discovered that this idea wasn’t, in fact, brilliant. Eventually I returned to it, figured out how to calculate the dominant color, and finished my visualization. I left this project for years, distracted by work, life, travel, talks. It’s the most efficient way to lay out circles. I knew how I wanted to display the images, though: in a layout called the Sunflower layout. I thought about scaling the image down to a 1x1 square and seeing what was left, but that seemed like cheating. I thought it would show travel, and progression through the seasons.īut I didn’t know how to calculate the dominant color from an image. Around 2011, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: I wanted to be able to visualize a photo series as a series of colors. Color-the cool whites of winter, pale hues of spring, lush greens of summer, and reds and yellows of fall-is what visually differentiates the seasons. ![]() When I was traveling in China I often saw series of four paintings showing the same place in different seasons. A Brilliant Idea (That Wasn’t All That Brilliant) ![]() Cate blogs at Accidentally in Code and is on Twitter. Cate doesn’t exactly live in Colombia but she spends a lot of time there, and has lived and worked in the UK, Australia, Canada, China the United States, previously as an engineer at Google, an Extreme Blue intern at IBM, and a ski instructor. She is Director of Mobile Engineering at Ride, speaks internationally on mobile development and engineering culture, co-curates Technically Speaking and is an advisor at Glowforge. Research Software Engineering with Python,Ĭate left the tech industry and spent a year finding her way back whilst building her passion project Show & Hide. Software Design by Example in JavaScript, If you enjoy these books, you may also enjoy
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