Yesterday I talked about coding as a narrative. Not just implementing something, but also making that process transparent to others through good storytelling.
An excellent comment on my post mentioned Quilez’s “Painting a Selfie Girl, with Maths” video. Like many people, I have been very inspired by that video.
One problem is that it’s a heroic effort, with a one-off result. Quilez is supremely talented, and was also willing to put in the immense work required to produce this beautiful cultural artifact.
What I am hoping for is lower hanging fruit. How can we empower other programmers to share their stories, without asking them to create an entire system on their own?
I would like to help make “programming as storytelling” into something that is easy to learn and to use. The goal would be not so much “Hey, I managed to do this”, as it would be “Hey, you can do this.”
Sorry if this is completely silly, but are you not just asking for the programmer to be more verbose (and regular) with their commits and commit messages?
Couldn’t github do what you are asking?
I think if you keep your system honest, so that it records also the first happy hour, when you easily type a few hundred lines of code, but then come six hours of looking at it and debugging, only to fix it by a one character edit, then people will start appreciating coding more. 🙂 Or run away. 🙂