Code DIY

I've been watching a lot of YouTube DIY videos lately. Not because I'm looking to learn anything in particular, I just enjoy watching people make stuff. There's something really satisfying about following along as experts do what they're good at. These days it's mostly videos from Matthias Wandel, but I can trace the feeling back to the old Junkyard Wars series. I'm also a particular fan of Adam Savage's One Day Builds.

It'd be really interesting to try to replicate this experience with software projects. While there are a lot of tutorial videos, I find them too heavy on education and light on entertainment. What I'd really like to see is a focus on interesting projects: take some idea and run it from concept to completion in a day. You'd document the steps, but not with the goal of completely explaining every technical detail, more like giving a general idea of the process and the tools involved.

The tricky part would be making the code interesting even for people who don't know a lot about code. The real strength of those DIY videos is the way they strike a balance between being technical enough for a technical audience, but entertaining enough for a casual audience. Historically, that's not been a strength of software, but I think it could be done. You'd need to put effort into it in all of the stages: selecting interesting projects, explaining what you're doing well, and editing tightly to keep it compelling. Difficult, but not impossible.

And if you could pull it off it would be a really interesting contribution to the field. I think a lot of people don't engage with programming because you just hit this terrifying wall of interconnected ideas. There's so much to learn all at once before you get anything that works, and the tools are very unforgiving. This would be a chance to bring some shallow culture to creating software, to make it familiar enough to outsiders that it stops being threatening.

Plus if people will watch AIs play fighting games for hours, surely the bar can't be that high.