Programming tutorials

Before you start making bots, consider reading these essays and articles. Also worth browsing: resources for cleaning up your bot’s language.

Page content¶

Intro to programming
Working with images
Working with text
Working with data
Emoji
Technical stuff

Coding is for art, fashion, space travel, activism, anything! Projects can be as diverse as the people writing them. https://t.co/hfJ1eHcVEP

— Emily Claire Reese (@eclairereese) August 18, 2017

Intro to programming¶

What is code?: What do you need to know about code to survive in a suspicious world? (Paul Ford via bloomberg.com)
‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth: When people build a database to manage reading lists or feed their neighbors, that’s coding—and culture. (Paul Ford via wired.com)
Programming from A to Z: This course focuses on programming strategies and techniques behind procedural analysis and generation of text-based data. (Daniel Shiffman via shiffman.net)
Getting started with creative coding: 10-minute tutorials: Getting started with creative coding in just a few minutes. (Harry Alisavakis, Mario Carrillo, Kate Compton, ilithya, Ruth John, and Sam Wray via githubuniverse.com)
Exploring generative spaces: A quickstart to generative art. (Sabine Wieluch via githubuniverse.com)
The Node Beginner Book: 13 exercises with code examples. (Glitch via glitch.com)
Glitchet: Art Resources: Tutorials, tools, and interesting links for making glitchy art. (Glitchet via glitchet.com)
PROCJAM Tutorials: Make something that makes something. (Glitchet via procjam.com)
So you want to build a generator…: Essay for people getting started with building generators and for practiced experts who want a way to organize their knowledge. (Kate Compton via galaxykate0.tumblr.com)
Practical Procedural Generation for Everyone: How to use simple data structures to control complex generators. (Kate Compton via youtube.com)
Color Theory and Procedural Generation: The fastest, easiest way to turn your programmer art into something people will actually want to look at is to get a handle on color. (Cassandra Lugo via procjam.com)
Generating things with code: Introduction to procedural content generation. (Nicolas Barradeau via medium.com)
r/proceduralgeneration: Procedural generation subreddit. (Reddit via reddit.com)
Machine Learning for Artists: Practical guides, tutorials, and code samples. (@ml4a_ via ml4a.github.io)

Working with images¶

Algorithmic Art: Tips to improve your generative artwork. (Tyler Hobbs via tylerlhobbs.com)
Little Planet Procedural: Generating art with code. (Alan Luo via alanluo.com)
Generative Machine Learning on the Cloud: Generative art and synthetic image generation with TensorFlow and Google Cloud. (Emily Glanz via medium.com)
Building An AI Artist Using Neural Networks: Generate artistic images with Python and NumPy. (Anand Krish via fossbytes.com)
Five Strategies For Collaborating With A Machine: Video from PROCJAM 2016. (Emily Short via youtube.com)
Generative Artistry: Generative art tutorials, news and love. (Tim Holman via generativeartistry.com)
Why Love Generative Art?: Our world has turned digital at breakneck speed and no art form has captured this transitional time period better than generative art. (Jason Bailey via artnome.com)
Loops & Early Cinema: a Brief History: From early film history to computational art (Golan Levin via github.com)

Working with text¶

General¶

Finding Rhymes with Python: Learn about finding rhymes with code. (Nate Smith via docs.google.com)
Electronic Literature: Explore interactive fiction, chatterbots, hypertext, and kinetic poetry in this free edX course. (Dr. Mark Sample, Kristen Eshleman, Robert McSwain, and Sara Swanson via edx.org)
Best Practices for Procedural Narrative Generation: Research and tools that can be used to create procedural narrative experiences. (Rogelio Cardona-Rivera and Chris Martens via youtube.com)
N-Grams and Markov Chains: Learn about the Markov Chain technique with node.js. (Daniel Shiffman via shiffman.net)
Markov Models Write Fairy Tales: Build things like Twitter bots with Markov Chains. (Aja Hammerly via thagomizer.com)
Rivescript: Video introduction by the author. (Noah Petherbridge via youtube.com)
Machines Are Poets Too: Resources for creating generative text with code. (Brent Bailey via github.com)

Python¶

Working with Tracery in Python: How to use Tracery in your Python programs. (Allison Parrish via gist.github.com)
NLP concepts with spaCy: Introduction to basic concepts and techniques from natural language processing. (Allison Parrish via gist.github.com)
Working with CSV files: Quick intro to "comma-separated values" files. (Allison Parrish via gist.github.com)
Understanding word vectors: A tutorial for the "Reading and Writing Electronic Text" class. (Allison Parrish via gist.github.com)
Quick word counts with Counter objects: How to count the number of times a word occurs in a text. (Allison Parrish via gist.github.com)

Working with data¶

Codecademy: APIs: Learn how to use popular APIs to make your own applications. (Codecademy via codecademy.com)
How to query Wikipedia like a database: Learn how to use DBPedia to get data from Wikipedia. (Darius Kazemi via tinysubversions.com)
Text Mining Course: Learn to mine patterns from a collection of text with Python. (Peter Organisciak via github.com)
How to Use the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Collection Listing API: Automated way to get the images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Zac A. Gross via zacagross.wordpress.com)

I am a Software Engineer using serious Software Engineering Analogies pic.twitter.com/a7iZmjWRah

— Terian ??? (@spine_cone) April 3, 2017

Emoji 🤖¶

That Emoji Does Not Mean What You Think It Means: Emoji you send on an iPhone might not be the emoji that is received on a Nexus. (Alissa Walker via gizmodo.com)
The whimsical world of emoji swearing: Is it possible to swear in emoji? (Stan Carey via stronglang.wordpress.com)
What is Gender and Why Does it Matter to Emoji?: From the original emoji set, only one symbol could be construed as encapsulating any aspect of gender: the ubiquitous 🚻 restroom symbol. (@pauldhunt via blog.emojipedia.org)
The Westernization of Emoji: How fortune cookies explain the westernization of emoji. (Adrienne LaFrance via theatlantic.com)
Emoji for fun and profit (Webstock ’17): To understand how emoji work, you first need to learn a little bit about Japanese cellphones in the late 90s, the mechanics of Unicode, and how computers render display fonts. (Cal Henderson via vimeo.com)
emojis.json: List of emoji with names, shortcodes, unicode and html entities. (Oliver Raduner via gist.github.com)

In honor of #WorldEmojiDay, revisit where it all started—NTT DOCOMO’s original set of 176 emoji https://t.co/ocjHTwd0Ou #MoMACollection pic.twitter.com/4yr1lNPSMd

— Museum of Modern Art (@MuseumModernArt) July 17, 2017

Technical stuff¶

Learn command line: Really friendly introduction to using command line. (Tracy Osborn via hellowebbooks.com)
Troubleshooting cron jobs for bot makers: How to troubleshoot your cron jobs for UNIX beginners and bot makers. (Liz Rush via lizmrush.com)
Wizard Zines: A collection of technical tutorials in a comics form. (Julia Evans via wizardzines.com)

Can’t find what you’re looking for? Be sure to reach out on Twitter, or ask in the Botmakers community!

“The truth is that generative artists skillfully control both the magnitude and the locations of randomness introduced into the artwork.”
– @artnome #GenerativeArt #Generative #ComputerArt pic.twitter.com/CHl8USMKLl

— Fabio Catapano (@fabiocatapano) July 23, 2019