On being a tinkerer

My grandfather was a tinkerer and builder of systems and tools.

I am too, though my style is less in the physical realm.

My Computer Programming origin story

I remember being about 15 and finding a book in the school library that was about coding fantasy text adventure games in Turbo Pascal. I typed in a long listing from this book and it wouldn’t compile. I got help from my Dad and we attempted to debug it. In the end I’d gained enough programming knowledge after this attempt such that I could retype the listing and it ran correctly.

During this whole experience a happy side effect was that through it I learned to touch type.

My Year 10 code effort

In Year 10 we were taught some Turbo Pascal and I raced ahead to the final project as I was already pretty proficient. I wrote a database with data entry fields that allowed special keys like “insert” to allow one to insert text at the current cursor position and the “backspace” key to delete text to its left, and “tab” key to jump between fields to all work properly as part of the data entry.

At the end of term when I handed in my code listing my teacher had written “Thanks. I learned a lot!” on top of my work.

A project within my Secondary School workplace

After the end of my own Schooling I went and worked at a Secondary School as a computer technician for a few years.

The project I am most proud of was a Tcl\Tk control panel which talked to Red Hat linux used linux firewall rules at the backend allowing library staff to easily turn the internet off or on for their bank of computers.

A project during my time as a Disability Support Worker

I created a simple Raspberry Pi based media player. Initially this project also allowed for the user to send messages to people on Facebook but unfortunately they closed the APIs that this part of the project was using.

The pace increases

The pace of building little tools has increased more recently.

Firstly, prior to the Not Degree which has inspired much of this activity I built my Wiggly Spanish TTS (Text-to-Speech) web-book by vibe coding Python scripts.

Things I’ve directly built for my Not Degree

• My s,e,d scripts to record hours spent within my Not Degree
• bag and sandboxchain (sc) which respectively help me get across the threshold into meaningful work and record it for me.
• bookchain on my phone which allows me to photograph book covers once I deem I’ve interacted deeply enough with them.
• codechain (cochain) which I build today which counts lines of code I write in a non-vibe coded context to help me improve my coding.
• My website here which uses markup via hugo at the back-end.

This small bag of tools specifically for the Not Degree are all incredibly humble, require very few lines of code and do pretty simple things - but there is also magic in them as they do just what is needed and no more.

My experience with them is that I have done nothing so much as hack myself into returning to my Not Degree over and over again, while maintaining evidence this is what’s happening.