2021: Teaching Robots how to Drum

or Auld Landroid

30 Dec 2021 - atrodo - Song: Auld Lanxiety by Five Iron Frenzy

I started messing around with the code that would become Teaching Robots how to Drum back at the end of 2018. At the end of 2019 I recapped what I had done for the first time, setting the precedent of yearly reflection I now find myself doing. I appreciate the time I take to look back on the past year that I probably would not do otherwise. This includes taking a deep look at all the information; the stats, the blogs, and what has happened in a set period of time.

To start with, I thought I’d go over some basic information again:

Made only around 50 commits
Changed about 120 files to the tune of 15,000 inserts and only 1,300 deletions
Wrote 4 blog posts
Reevaluated how I think about beats incorrectly
Ran a real world demonstration of this project
Posted 30 songs created by my robots, released on YouTube
Contemplated what I had created
Contemplated what I had created even more and how I can improve it

Unfortunately, the list itself doesn’t really reflect how much work I’ve done in the past year. As I look now at this list, I didn’t realize that I had only written 4 blogs. This was because a lot of what I have done this year has not been as interesting. Primarily predominated by grunt work, listening to output, criticising it, and the like.

I tend to believe that as software matures, the day to day operations of the code itself also matures. That is, it becomes less flashy and more routine. This cycle gets broken as new features and systems are added or revitalized. The bug fixing and goal chasing are part of that day to day that can get lost in all the excitement, but is no less important to do lest the software become unwieldy.

I think this year has been exactly that, far more operational than discovery. It took a couple months to get to the point of releasing videos, and quite a few months to recover, evaluate, and improve from that experiment. There’s not been a lot of new features or major improvements, but I’m at a phase where new features and major improvements are not what’s critical.

As for the near future, it is once again time to ramp up towards new releases. While there is another round of 30 song commitment, I’m hoping that this time I can get to a place where there is a new upload every day after that first 30 days. I’m looking forward to an exciting new year.