Do the right thing, do what you want.
This week saw my company’s second quarterly Do What You Want Day (#DWYWD). This is a day set aside by the company to work on anything we would like, from personal programming projects to improvements to the office to social experiments - no holds barred, you name it. Many worked on process improvements, automation of manual tasks that will make their jobs easier. Others spent the day experimenting with attractive technologies or novel ways to look at financial data.
I usually use DWYWD to do something wholly other than my day-to-day tasks. Where I typically lead a large team, I will either work solo or accept assignments and direction from others. Where I would code in C# or work on the web, I will try another language or solve an unfamiliar problem.
On this day I helped joined an effort to create new, computer generated art to decorate our development space. I introduced the team to ContextFree, a software and language created to programmatically generate art. We all had a lot of fun playing with recursion and exploring HSBCA color codes. A few of our scripts would take your system down. Others were quite amazing.
Below is one of my favorite efforts from DWYWD that I call, somewhat blandly, Rings. The script for this image, along with some of my other, humble efforts may be found in my GitHub repository.
