We had a beautiful Coding For Humans day at the Lab for the Recently Possible last week. Ten people came for the day to learn how to create websites and web apps, with little or no experience beforehand. Amongst them were designers, writers, an event manager, animator, PR freelancer and geographical mapping expert. And boy did they do incredibly well! By the end of the day, people had created their first web app – a kind of interactive post-it stickies app.
Tom and Pete, working with me on the training, did a great job of explaining what can seem like pretty tough concepts as simply as sticking Lego together (well, almost). And a big shout out to Nest cafe, who laid on a gorgeous Mediterranean spread for lunch.
The Lab for the Recently Possible is open again, in a beautiful, light and leafy home in Brighton’s North Laine, and we have a whole set of new events starting up. Come along, or tell a friend.
In our first four workshops, you can learn to code (in a day), learn JavaScript (from scratch), learn how to build data visualisations — and learn how to be more creative with money.
This new incarnation of The Lab is still taking shape. So please get involved.
We want to host workshops that teach the most potent, useful cutting-edge technologies in a friendly, clear and simple way. And we want to bring experimental art, social movements and personal development under one roof. And get people involved and talking to each other, connecting and collaborating.
Come and welcome the Lab for the Recently Possible to its new location at the heart of Brighton. It’s a pretty informal affair. Children welcome. Bring along something to sup, and a game if you fancy. We’ll provide cake. Rumour has it there may be a supersized canvas and paints, for your creative pleasure.
Learn to split a restaurant bill amicably. And at least seven other valuable lessons about working creatively with money.
Future dates: 1 Aug, 5 Sept
Community events
Async is now at the Lab, with talks and meetups twice a month on JavaScript and related tech. On Thurs 23rd May, it’ll be Async’s third birthday, and we’re hosting a Show n’ Tell of 5-minute lightning talks.
Peter Cook is a software developer from Lewes, East Sussex. Here, he writes about visualising the topics that interest people when they mark themselves as attending our developer meetup, Async. Peter will be speaking at Async in January on using the data visualisation toolkit, D3.js
During the summer months of 2012, the Lab for the Recently Possible held three Data Visualisation Lab Days in which a group of artists, programmers and other interested parties met up to create and experiment with data visualisation.
Prem was keen to explore different ways of visualising and presenting attendance data from the series of regular talks on JavaScript called Async. To help us with this, he supplied data from the Lanyrd website containing vast quantities of information of who’s attended which sessions and what topics were covered in those sessions.
I took on this challenge and looked at a couple of ways of visualising this data. Both of the resulting visualisations show how many people attended sessions of a given topic (e.g. front-end, architecture, games).
Heat Matrix
My first visualisation is a ‘heat matrix’, which is a grid of squares coloured or shaded according to a given value. In this case, each row represents a topic and each column an attendee. The darker the value, the more times that attendee has been to a talk of that topic.
Jaya Brekke is a photographer, filmmaker, designer and researcher, currently exploring the social impact of the economic crisis in Greece. She took part in one of our recent Data Visualisation Lab Days, where we brought together a melting pot of designers, programmers and people working in social projects. We wanted to build visual, interactive tools that make use of real world data to help elucidate problems and facilitate change. For a different take on the Lab Days, see Peter Cook’s energy visualisation.
It is too rare of a privilege to be able to spend an entire day with programers, geeks, charity workers and artists where everyone could share ideas and problems with each contributing solutions on how best to communicate and handle large amounts of data. The Data Viz Lab Day at the Lab for the Recently Possible was one such rare occasion, and I was immediately excited about the prospect of participating as I was about to embark on a research project in Athens in which I wanted to use data visualisation for gathering and analysing data about the financial crisis.
I came to the day with one specific idea in my mind: to have an interactive map of the increasing violent attacks against migrants in Athens. I wanted the map to be open for the people to contribute anonymously, as most attacks are currently not reported because of fear of the Greek police, which have a reputation of being racist and very violent. Making visible these hidden consequences of the crisis is a very important activist intervention into a debate that is still dominated by a financial discourse in which human and environmental costs are invisible. Continue reading »
Bring Your Own Beamer was an event we helped create at this year’s month-long Brighton Digital Festival.
BYOB is a global artists’ movement where the idea is simple: find a place, invite artists and ask them to bring projectors for the night. There are no limits to the projections: DIY videos, generative art, anything.
Brighton’s BYOB was held inside the warren of underground tunnels and chorus rooms beneath the Brighton Dome, as well as the Concert Hall. It was organised by somewhereto_ and Pop-up Brighton, with Dharmafly holding sessions at the Lab for the artists and makers to edit video montages, create computer art and collaborate with each other. The event attracted around 250 people and was extremely well received.
Peter Cook is a software developer from Lewes, East Sussex. He took part in our recent Data Visualisation Lab Days, where we brought together a melting pot of designers, programmers and others, working together to produce visual, interactive tools that make use of real world data to help elucidate problems and facilitate change. For a different take on the Lab Days, see Jaya Brekke’s post on visualising the social impact of the economic crisis in Greece.
I’ve been attending the Data Visualisation Lab Days at L4RP and it’s sparked off a revisit to an old project. I logged energy data from an energy monitor for a few months and used the flot library to draw daily graphs of my electricity consumption.
It was very revealing and helped me reduce my consumption significantly. However, I was aware that the graphs require a fair degree of analysis and interpretation and require an experienced eye to read them. So probably not that revealing to most people.
I spent a lot of time trying to develop an algorithm to identify patterns in the data so that information such as: ‘your kettle is costing you x pence a week’ but to no avail.
However, after attending a lab session at L4RP and finding out about the D3.js library there, I had another think about how the energy data can be presented. The result is a circular (or doughnut?) graph showing a week’s usage. Continue reading »
I first got a start in web development when I must have been 10 years old or so. I committed all the usual web design atrocities people joke about about these days, and I had several awful little websites littered across GeoCities. I went off and did other teenager-y sort of things and then a couple of years ago, I had a little epiphany and decided I wanted to come back to university and finish what I started.
I’m extremely glad that I did.
Coming back to university, learning web development and engaging with the Brighton web community has opened countless doors for me, and one such door opened for me when Prem kindly offered to take me on as an intern for the summer. This must have been quite a risk for him; I had a limited grasp of JavaScript that I had gained from my first year at university, so it was difficult to say where I was going to fit in the Dharmafly ‘ecosystem’. However, before too long, work for me and the other interns started to pile up.
Looking back 4 months, the difference between the programmer I was then and the programmer I am now is equivalent to night and day. Continue reading »
So what have I been up to? Well for one thing I’ve been working through a lot of issues. GitHub issues that is. Apparently building things that people use means that when they go wrong or could be doing things better, you’re the one that has to fix them or something.
Oh and documentation too. What’s that? I’ve completely changed the way something works and haven’t documented it? Can’t you just magically figure it out or something? Ok fine, I’ll write some stuff explaining it.
“A good programmer is a lazy programmer” is a term which rings true in the web development community. Web applications and software in general are made with the reliance on pre-existing libraries or web APIs.
The software I write indulges in the use of somebody’s shared code with good reason; the code usually does one thing and does it quite well (the Unix Philosophy).
However you may eventually reach a stage when you can no longer rely on pre-written libraries or web services to help you. This may be because your tool no longer exists or never existed in the first place.
At Dharmafly I feel there is a tool based approach to creating the software. We’ve written our own personal substitutes for two existing web services and I am very content with their outcome.
For one of our current projects we wanted to make use of the Google Social Graph API, but it has been recently discontinued. We created a service that has similar functionality, based on the rel="me" HTML attribute. In another project we were using YQL but found that it to be too unreliable. So we then created a similar service which had similar basic functionality. We’ll be open-sourcing both tools.
The significance of this software is not that it helped us make our intended software (although it did). It’s that we now have tools for future projects and the future projects of anyone else who would like to use them.
So, since I’m into my third week of my shiny new internship, let’s take a moment and reflect. What have I been doing? Well there are lots of little bits of JavaScript that I never knew were there before, be them forEach loops on the server or _.each loops on the client, JS is gradually getting easier to write.
At the moment I’m working on several projects, but two stand out for me. Firstly I’m getting stuck into Node.js and am in the process of writing a social graph API in the environment. It basically works likes this: you provide it with a URL, say, a Twitter profile, and from there it follows hyperlinks that contain rel="me" to other pages owned by the same person.
For the second project, I’m using Prem’s Pablo library to create an SVG drawing webapp for both touch devices and regular desktop browsers. There’s a wide scope for this project so I’m quite excited about it; one idea was floated about using Node.js and Socket.IO to create a collaborative drawing app, which I think sounds awesome. The project has also been a great opportunity for me to get my head around the challenges of targeting a variety of different devices, along with all of the specific JavaScript and CSS that comes with that, together with a good way of architecting it all into something that’s usable and makes sense.
Basically I’m being paid to have fun – a fairly surreal experience as I was pretty sure that when you called something work it was meant to suck; apparently this is yet another instance of TV lying to me.
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