Starting at RC

I've been brainstorming what I'll work on at The Recurse Center when I start next week. I plan to spend a good amount of time programming but leave some room for serendipity. For now, my idea is to write a program that turns on the lights when I whistle a particular tune.

It's a concrete idea. I think it's achievable with wiggle room for exploration. Apparently it's been done before more than once.

I can imagine the steps to get there: record things, identify a whistle, make a request to the HomeKit API, turn on the lights. The good news is that I have no idea how to do any of that. It's good news from an "I'm trying to learn things" perspective anyways. I can also imagine plenty of ways to take it further if I finish. Like what if the program whistles back?

I want to give Erlang a try for this project. Last week, I read through some of Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!. The syntax is funky, but I feel I've already learned a lot from reading through some of the chapters on concurrency and distribution. I'm not sure it's the most practical choice, but I think it'll be fun. I have a couple of Raspberry Pis gathering dust in my closet, so maybe I can set up a lil cluster.

I'll continue writing about what I'm up to at RC, so you can look forward to updates soon. Keep an eye on my projects at rc.colbyr.com.