I’m relatively new to the visualization space, and I am surprised by the community’s lack of open source code. When I taught myself Ruby (a language with a strong open source community) I learned mostly by reading other people’s code and imitating it. Ruby package repositories and sites like Github exposed me to ways of writing code that I would probably have never experienced otherwise. Budding visualists don’t often have the opportunity to look over an expert artist’s shoulder.

I’ve been thinking about writing an extension to Processing that would make uploading to Github (which has a site feature where sketches could be embedded) as easy as “File/Export”. Maybe if it was easier to post code on the internet more computer artists would be willing to share their process work.