Show and tell at NYU, and meeting Daniel Shiffman

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 -0400

In October 2026 I went to Processing Community Day at NYU’s ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) in Brooklyn. It’s a day of talks, workshops and demos from the creative-coding community around Processing and p5.js.

With Daniel Shiffman at ITP.

I spent the afternoon walking around the exhibitions, where people were showing interactive pieces built with code. One was a mirror made of small wooden tiles that tilt to follow whoever stands in front of it.

A mirror of wooden tiles reacting to a hand.

The exhibition hall had a whole row of these: laptops and screens running people’s sketches and projects, each with a little label next to it about the work.

Walking through the exhibitions.

Meeting Daniel Shiffman

A lot of what I know about creative coding I learned from Daniel Shiffman. He runs The Coding Train on YouTube, wrote The Nature of Code, and teaches at ITP. I used to watch his videos a lot when I was younger. When I met him, I told him it was great to finally see him in person, because I never expected to get to meet him and take a photo with him. He thanked me and was really warm about it, and he gave me some of his Coding Train stickers (the little choo-choo train).

I met him around the Intro to Open Source talk in the auditorium.

Intro to Open Source in the auditorium.

When we talked, he suggested I try building boids: Craig Reynolds’ flocking simulation, where each bird follows three simple rules (stay apart, line up, stay together), and a whole flock emerges from that.

My show and tell

In the evening there was an Open Projector slot, where anyone could plug in their laptop and show something. So I got up and showed some of the things I’ve built:

Flappy Bird that learns to play itself, built with ml5.js, a project I’d shared on Twitter a while back
Sophie, a voice-based shopping assistant that helps you explore and pick clothes
A smart voice dictation assistant that understands what you mean, not just what you say

Presenting at Open Projector.

My message to the room was simple: with LLMs, you can now build things that just weren’t possible for one person to build before. It was a good crowd, and it went well.

Building boids the same day

I didn’t want to wait to try Shiffman’s suggestion, so I built it right there at the event with Claude Code, and then kept going:

Boids: the flocking simulation, with sliders for each rule. You can click to add birds, or place obstacles they steer around.
Boids 3D: the same flock inside a 3D box you can rotate.
Rotating Circles: three rotating circles joined by lines, which weave into string-art patterns as you change their speeds.

Boids running on my laptop in the auditorium.

All three went into my sketches gallery that night, the first new sketches there since 2023.

The day ended with live performances, including a cellist playing next to visuals on the big screen.

Evening performances to close the day.

It felt like a loop closing. I learned creative coding from Shiffman’s videos years ago, and now I got to show my own work in his building and build something he suggested.

processing on Aldrin Jenson

Show and tell at NYU, and meeting Daniel Shiffman

Meeting Daniel Shiffman

My show and tell

Building boids the same day