Rediscovering a lost love

As a kid, I used to spend hours and hours writing computer code. The BBC Micro was my playground, and I built all sorts of things in BBC BASIC. I guess a fitting thing for a child who owed his existence to his parents’ meeting at the BBC.

And then we got an Atari ST, and the GUI got in the way of me being able to code. I couldn’t make the intellectual shift from procedures and lines of code to objects and events.

I went to university and, for a brief while, was taught FORTRAN. I can remember nothing about FORTRAN.

In the mid-1990s, by now working at the London School of Economics, I learned HTML and built my first website for the British Journal of Sociology. It was all hand-coded, and then I taught someone in the BJS office how to keep it up to date. I also helped to build a website for a friend’s record company in a similar fashion.

Then I discovered Active Server Pages, and by 1999, I was writing code again, this time whilst working at the BBC. We built applications for the intranet, and then, as the team grew, I started to help manage developers and just like that… I forgot all about how to do it.

I have had many ideas for things I might build, but never the patience to go through re-learning the finickity syntax of a new language. All curly brackets look the same to me. I had forgotten the joy of building things through code (and to be honest, many of the things I built with code in my working life were pretty boring anyway…)

Just before Christmas, I had a play with Chat GPT. I’d been inspired by a few things – a realisation that generative AI could extend my creative capabilities with the work that I’m doing with the Business Meerkat cards, using gen AI tools in Adobe Illustrator, and also a chat with Tom Whitwell about how he’d been using GPT to write code.

To cut a long story short, I’ve rediscovered my joy of coding by having a machine that will do the coding for me.

I’ve been building things, creative-ish things, for my own enjoyment for the first time in 40 years.

You can see some of them here.

(you can also see the ChatGPT conversations I had to create the code).

Some observations…

• I needed quite a bit of prior knowledge. I know how things like websites work from first principles. I’m not sure any of this would have been possible without that prior knowledge.
• You need to break things down in a way that makes sense for writing code.
• GPT4 seems quite willing to hand off drudge work to the human. Usually, that must be countered by asking for automated ways to remove the drudge work, not just asking it to do it.
• I’m finding this all quite fun.

It’s not high-end coding. It’s not particularly clever stuff. But in a few hours, I’ve been able to create things that I simply didn’t have the time or patience to build before unlocking how GPT could help me do it.

I’ll probably be building more things.