Yarns, fibers, and fabrics. You have more in common with the weavers of yesteryear than you realize. In this expedition into the past of fiber arts, we'll explore how our coding art is the continuation of our ancestors at the loom, where some of our IDE defaults came from, and why we owe the industrial revolution to an 18th-century French fashion fad.
I'll share stories about how fiber arts influenced some technological advances that we take for granted. Cryptography (knitting encoded messages into sweaters), mathematics (making three-dimensional shapes impossible any other way), and computing (the first programs were on 80-thread-wide wooden punch cards for Jaquard looms). I want to show attendees how fiber arts still share deep parallels to modern coding by creating a React app using a knitting pattern as a spec.
As an artisan knitter, and a long-time programmer, I found that programming came easily to me because of the concepts I'd learned while teaching myself to knit. In the beginning, I was able to use knitting metaphors to make the syntax stick.