Nicole Watts Recurse Resume
I was at the Recurse Center for the Winter 1 2024 batch (Nov 4 - Dec 13).
Quick summary: I did over a dozen small projects including many web projects, two talks, a hardware project, and some writing. My main themes were storytelling, love for the web, collaboration, intentional practice, and curiosity. The thing I made that I'm most proud of is The Optimist (although it's tough to choose a favorite!).
Themes
I came in with a project idea but found that I was drawn by a couple of themes:
- Storytelling
- Love for the web
- Collaboration
- Intentional Practice
- Curiosity: Arduino day / getting to know others / book clubs / Ran Linux for the duration of the batch and used open source software for everything I made
The main theme I found that I was exploring was storytelling. How can I use technology tools to tell people about something I care about or make them feel something? This showed up in the newszine, The Optimist, in creative coding, in the talks I gave, and in the sessions I participated in.
The Optimist
The Optimist was a news-zine about what's going on at RC. I served as the editor, designer, and main writer. It was a chance to be creative and flex project management skills as I worked with an illustrator, contributing writers, and conducted more than 20 interviews for the publication.
Why I made this: I wanted a chance to talk to people and to organize a big project. This gave me both!
Presentations
Friend
Why I made this: I had just finished the first chapter in The Nature of Code and felt excited about the concepts of randomness and random walkers. I wanted to share that excitement and offer others the opportunity to join the study group. This was my capstone project for that first chapter.
Technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue, sli.dev, p5.js. All of the simulations are in p5 with a custom tiny framework I wrote for playing/pausing/resetting.
The Cards
Why I made this: I've been thinking about this for a long time (originally this was called "You belong."). As computer-people we face some common challenges and have some common needs. I wanted to talk about the ways that I've found helpful in dealing with being creative and working on a machine that is inflexible all day.
Technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue, sli.dev. This project made heavy use of CSS animations and was a chance for me to experiment and play with motion as a tool for storytelling.
Web sites
- Is Lion Sleeping: A silly website to check if Lion is sleeping or why he's definitely not sleeping (technologies: TypeScript, Node, Express)
- Contact Form: A contact form so that others can get in touch with me without having my email on the internet (technologies: TypeScript, Node, Express)
- The Optimist: A landing page for the newszine so that others can download and enjoy it (technologies: just plain basic HTML and CSS)
- Moon: What's the moon up to? See the phase of the moon for tonight (technologies: TypeScript, Fastify, Handlebars, CSS animations)
- Your Life - an interactive illustration of the length of your lifeline. (technologies: plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
- Show off - a tool for showing off coding websites (technologies: JavaScript)
- Nicole's Notes: A place to go to see my notes. (technologies: Quartz, JavaScript)
- RC Resume: You are here. (technologies: Eleventy, JavaScript)
Intentional Practice
Writing
- Code Seams: An essay and worked example on the idea of intentionally adding places in code where testing, alterations, and changes can be placed.
Hardware
- Environment sensor
Creative Coding
- List of creative coding things
Infrastructure
- Dokku host for webapps
- Notes.nicole.computer
- Deploying all of the sites I made
- Analytics / Plausible
Book Clubs
- Nature of Code study group
- Missing Semester study group