The motivation is simply that I’m curious about whether others:

  • share my appreciation of the creative process, in data analysis and coding; and

  • enjoy being able to observe an idea go from conception through to rough, unpolished state

The guiding principle is to maximise time in flow state.


creative, unpolished work

A format that I am leaning towards is screencasts because I am interested in capturing problem-solving in real-time. More accurately, the nature of data and coding work will mostly be overcoming a series of technical trivialities. I expect there to be, however, a somewhat surprising amount of appeal in observing the creative process due to the unappreciated art that is mixed in with the science, in the nature of it.

Ideally, we would also get a sense of the thought process of the individual as they struggle and muddle through. After experimenting with the screencast format, I have settled on an interspersed mix of commentary and coding. Although I would have liked to have adopted the format favoured by George Hotz, where the individual narrates and works at the same time, this was abandoned due to its surprising difficulty - particularly as I am not directly interacting with an audience such as through twitch or youtube.


documentation & discipline

In addition to being a mechanism for sharing my exploratory work, this blog also serves as both documention and a form of discipline. Having a public open forum will focus my attention and encourage me to write up tidbits of information. The data and coding artifacts I create will also serve as documentation, and will hopefully help and inspire others. A feature of my posts is that I will deliberately start a lot things to optimise for my enjoyment to thus increase output.