Tech Talk: Beautiful and Useless Coding with Allison Parrish

Tech Talk: Beautiful and Useless Coding with Allison Parrish

Author: Adam Gordon Bell - Software Developer November 16, 2019 Duration: 52:20

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

Generative Art involves using the tools of computation to creative ends. Adam talks to Allison Parrish about how she uses word vectors to create unique poetry. Word vectors represent a fundamentally new tool for working with text.

Adam and Allison also talk about creative computer programming and building twitter bots and what makes something art.

"Computer programming is beautiful and useless. That's the reason that you should want to do it is not because it's going to get you a job, because it has a particular utility, but simply for the same reasons that you would pick up oil paints or do origami or something. It's something that has like an inherent beauty to it that is worthy of studying."

"For my purpose as an artist and as like someone who teaches programming to artists and designers, I want to emphasize that it's not only a vocational thing, it's not only a way for building things like to do apps for that matter. It's not only a way to, you know, write useful applications that help to organize communities or help to do scientific work and other like good applications of programming and software engineering. But there is this like very essential, very core part of computer programming that is just joyful. Um, that's about understanding your own mind in different ways and understanding the world in different lands."

Experimental Creative Writing with the Vectorized Word

Every Icon

Word2Vect

Allison Parrish's Website

Tracery

Articulations

Every Word


In CoRecursive: Coding Stories, host Adam Gordon Bell sits down with software developers to explore the human narratives woven into the technology we build. This isn't a technical interview focused on syntax or best practices, but a deeper dive into the pivotal moments, creative struggles, and personal insights that shape how code comes to life. Each conversation reveals the context behind decisions, the stories of failure and breakthrough, and the often-overlooked human elements that define our craft. As a software developer himself, Adam guides these discussions with genuine curiosity, pulling out anecdotes and reflections you won't hear anywhere else. The podcast lives in the intersection of News, Education, and How-To, but through the lens of lived experience. You'll hear about the origins of influential projects, the rationale behind unconventional solutions, and the personal journeys that lead developers to their philosophies. Listening feels like pulling up a chair with thoughtful peers, offering a richer understanding of the profession that goes far beyond the screen. This is where the abstract becomes concrete, through the stories and people behind the code.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

CoRecursive: Coding Stories
Podcast Episodes
Story: Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:19
What if you had to fight against your company's culture to bring a revolutionary tool to life? Meet Jeffrey Snover, the Microsoft architect behind PowerShell, a command tool that transformed Windows system administration…
Story: From Burnout to Breakthrough [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:26
Can you imagine risking your career to making coding easier to learn? Meet Felienne Hermans, a professor who did just that by stepping beyond academia to redefine coding education. Disillusioned by her research's limited…
Story: Coding Machines [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:12
What if the tools you trust were actually betraying you? Join us for a riveting story where a team of software developers discovers that their compiler is compromised. What starts as suspicion of a simple bug quickly esc…
Story - Code as a Lifeline: Brain Injury Sparks Python Mastery [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:12
What if your dreams were suddenly ripped away? What if your talents vanished, your passions erased? That's what happened to Jason McDonald when a traumatic brain injury at 16 ravaged his planned destiny of becoming a doc…
Story: Platform Takes The Pain [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:36
How did Spotify scale from 10 engineers to 100s to 1000s ...without slowing down? Without becoming corporate? Facing an IPO deadline, Pia Nilsson worked with 300 teams to transform how Spotify built software. She spearhe…