Code Doodles

Or developer doodling…

According to wikipedia, a doodle is a type of sketch, an unfocused drawing made while a person’s attention is otherwise occupied. Unfortunately they don’t seem to have a word for the type of code written while a developer’s attention is otherwise occupied — perhaps “code-doodle” would be appropriate.

In the past I’ve written lots of code-doodles — sometimes to play with new technologies, sometimes to demonstrate a particular technique, and sometimes to make myself feel better by getting some small and silly piece of code working while my mind is otherwise occupied trying to get some much bigger and not-so-silly piece of code to actually work.

While most of this code was often written as isolated pieces and subsequently ignored, recently we’ve been putting some of these code-doodles into a single (and slightly crazy) project — instead of just doodling for the sake of it, we’ve had a context to put the doodles in, which has helped define actual real-world uses. Since Karla and I cover the whole spectrum of design and development the code-doodles aren’t limited to one area — they go from CSS, JavaScript and AJAX to WebObjects and Cocoa. And, for reasons that are still to be explained, t-shirts, but that’s a story for another post.

So, do you code-doodle? Do the code-doodles take on a life of their own? And should our code-doodles be allowed to roam free?