At last, we reach what truly matters to every developer: code. You may find it surprising that we are only now discussing code. This is because the primary function of your code is often tied to your job, rather than being intended as content.
For many developers, coding and sharing their work go beyond merely solving issues; they represent a medium for creative expression and communication. Through open source contributions, interactive demos, libraries, art, and music, code can be crafted into content that informs, entertains, and fosters connections.
Let’s explore how developers can turn code into content across a variety of platforms and purposes.
Code as content emerged around the same time that developers began blogging. As people wrote about their coding passion, they often shared snippets of code, illustrating new concepts or presenting solutions to problems they encountered.
As code content grew more intricate over time, many developers found it increasingly challenging to keep up with the examples shared. This highlighted the need for friendly platforms that allowed developers to effortlessly recreate their environments and manage dependencies without the stress of installing everything on their local machines. Fortunately, this paved the way for the wonderful rise of "code playgrounds" in the early 2010s. Platforms like JSFiddle, CodePen, JS Bin, Plunker, or CSS Deck provide a simple and enjoyable way for developers to create, test, and share code snippets right in the browser.
My personal favorite in this category is CodePen! This fantastic code playground offers some really impressive technical features and is compatible with most popular frameworks and libraries. It truly fosters a sense of community with its awesome networking tools, discovery options, and fun periodic challenges. You can even create a whole coding portfolio that highlights your skills! But what I find most beneficial for content creators is the ability to easily embed your demos directly into your blog posts or articles.
Open-source software (OSS) serves as the backbone of modern software development, fueling nearly everything we developers create, from frameworks and libraries to entire operating systems. Beyond just the code, open source embodies a vibrant, collaborative movement that encourages the free sharing of knowledge and expertise. Contributors from around the world unite to help shape the future of technology, making this journey exciting for everyone involved.
Engaging with open source (OSS) presents developers with a great opportunity to build their presence and authority within the community. Your contributions become visible in public repositories, helping you gain credibility and recognition. You'll encounter a variety of codebases, workflows, and skilled maintainers, all of which enhance your skills. This experience allows you to connect with fellow developers and receive valuable feedback on your work.
There are many ways to contribute to open-source software (OSS). You can submit pull requests to address bugs, add new features, or improve test coverage. Additionally, enhancing documentation, examples, and guides can assist newcomers who wish to adopt and use the project. You can further this effort by creating tutorials or starter templates. The most significant involvement comes from becoming a project maintainer, where you can manage release cycles or coordinate community initiatives.
Taking the first step can feel overwhelming, and it’s completely normal to experience decision paralysis. But remember, you're absolutely not alone in this! There are numerous wonderful events and programs designed to help you get involved and take that leap.
One of the most beloved events of its kind is Hacktoberfest, happening each year throughout October. This wonderful event invites contributors to create at least four valid Pull Requests (PRs) for open-source projects. As a thank-you, participants are rewarded with fun digital contributor badges and promotional swag! Many online communities, such as dev.to, organize special activities that make it easier for everyone to participate in the fun.
Another important event is Google Summer of Code (GSoC). It is a global program, under the patronage of Google, that connects students and mentors through stipended open-source projects lasting approximately 12 weeks. Initially, the program was open only to students and recent graduates. However, since 2022, individuals aged 18 and over have been eligible to participate.
The third example is Outreachy. This is a diversity-focused program offering paid internships to underrepresented contributors in the open source community. The program takes place remotely over three months, occurring twice a year, from May to August or from December to March.
And that’s just the beginning! There are so many amazing open-source software (OSS) events, meetups, and hackathons out there to help you embark on this exciting journey, like FOSDEM, Software Freedom Day, Apereo Conferences, and many more. Choose an event that resonates with your skills and passions. Don’t hesitate to seek out beginner-friendly issues or projects with "good first issue" labels. By getting involved in open-source events and making regular contributions—even the small ones—you’ll not only enhance your skills but also create a fantastic public record of your achievements. Are you excited to dive in?
Reusable code is a truly powerful and lasting form of content created by developers. When you craft tools that others can easily import, install, or integrate into their workflows, you’re not just solving your challenges. You’re adding value to the entire developer community. This kind of contribution showcases your role as both a problem solver and a creator, while also serving as a public testament to your thought processes, priorities, and technical choices.
Creating and sharing modular code—like libraries, plugins, or frameworks—really enhances your presence in the developer community. By publishing your own package in a public registry, you empower other developers to use your solution. Additionally, this provides a searchable and shareable resource that can effectively highlight your work on your portfolio, resume, or personal website. Often, a well-documented tool can attract more attention than a blog post.
Reusable code is such a fantastic resource! It comes in many forms, including libraries that thoughtfully package logic for us to reuse. For instance, you might come across a handy set of JavaScript date utilities, a delightful collection of reusable React hooks, or even a Python module that simplifies file handling in remarkable ways. These valuable resources often find their home on language-specific registries, like npm for JavaScript, PyPI for Python, or crates.io for Rust. Isn't it wonderful how they all come together to elevate our coding experience?
Plugins and extensions are a great way to enrich your experience! They typically add extra features to existing platforms or tools, such as a customized plugin for VS Code or JetBrains IDEs, or a browser extension that enhances developer ergonomics. You can even discover delightful productivity add-ons for applications like Obsidian, Figma, or WordPress. It’s amazing how even simple tools, such as a color picker, icon pack, or keyboard shortcut helper, can resonate with many users if they meet a common need.
Design themes and UI kits are not just visual treats; they play a crucial role in the modular code ecosystem. This exciting realm covers themes for popular toolkits (such as Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS), elegant code editor color schemes, reusable component kits for frontend frameworks like Vue or React, and beautifully crafted interface kits created in Figma. For many developers, the journey of personal branding begins with the joy of designing and sharing a theme, which beautifully blends technical skills and creative flair.
When you're ready to think bigger, consider creating comprehensive frameworks or scaffolds to support your ideas. These often come in the form of helpful boilerplates, user-friendly command-line tools, or flexible starter kits. Whether you’re working with a static site generator that’s tailored using your favorite tools or a frontend scaffold that includes built-in accessibility features and design tokens, these frameworks assist fellow developers in speeding up their work while promoting best practices along the way.
One of the most exciting aspects of these contributions is their lasting impact! When you publish a tool today, it might be there for someone, helping them tackle a problem, for years to come. Plus, it opens up wonderful opportunities for further content creation: you could write engaging tutorials that explain how to use the tool, film a friendly video walkthrough showcasing its capabilities, share changelogs that highlight your development journey, or even invite others to join in and enrich your work together on this amazing project!
You don’t have to create something enormous to make a difference! Even a small utility with clear documentation can attract stars, followers, and encourage long-term use. The secret lies in addressing a genuine problem, ensuring it’s simple to adopt, and sharing it in a way that sparks curiosity and fosters collaboration.
Generative art is a captivating blend of programming and creativity! At its core, it uses code to generate stunning visual outputs, including patterns, images, animations, and even interactive pieces. For developers, this field presents an excellent opportunity to engage with programming in a way that transcends traditional functionality, transforming logic into something aesthetically pleasing.
Generative art offers a fresh perspective on design by moving away from traditional hand-crafted visuals. It embraces the magic of algorithms, randomness, and systems thinking to create captivating, intricate visuals that often take us by surprise. Just a few lines of code can lead to amazing compositions that evolve, animate, or respond to user interaction. This approach beautifully reflects the essence of open source: it’s all about experimentation, continuous improvement, and the joy of endless remixing.
One of the most popular tools in this area is p5.js, a JavaScript library inspired by Processing. It was designed to make programming easier and more inviting for artists, designers, and those just starting out. With p5.js, you can dive into creating shapes, experimenting with transformations, exploring colors, and engaging in interaction or animation, all within a friendly browser environment!
Numerous interesting frameworks can significantly expand your creative possibilities. Processing is a beloved choice for desktop-based sketches and installations, frequently used in generative visual arts education. Three.js excels in complex 3D work, making it ideal for immersive experiences, including VR-ready content. Additionally, tools like ShaderToy allow you to explore GLSL shader programming, enabling you to manipulate pixels on the GPU to create stunningly detailed visuals with just a bit of code.
For developers, diving into generative art is like a fun playground that also teaches invaluable skills! You get to explore geometry, color theory, animation timing, and data-driven rendering in an enjoyable way. This experience enhances your understanding of the rendering pipeline and graphics programming, all while providing a relaxed space to experiment, iterate, and share your creations. Plus, it can easily become part of your personal brand, especially when you share your journey through blog posts, time-lapse videos, or livestream coding sessions!
Whether you're creating minimalist line art with noise functions or complex procedural landscapes, generative art offers a wonderfully personal touch while being easy to share. It beautifully demonstrates that code doesn’t just have to function—it can also inspire and ignite creativity!
ASCII and ANSI art may seem like charming remnants from the early days of computing, but they continue to thrive and inspire creativity in today’s developer communities. What started as a practical solution for crafting images with simple text characters on limited terminals has evolved into a distinctive and expressive art form that carries meaningful cultural value.
Today, ASCII art beautifully blends nostalgia, minimalism, and that unique hacker vibe we all love. It adds a touch of creativity and personality to CLI (Command Line Interface) environments, where visuals may be limited, but charm is welcome! Just imagine those delightful splash screens in command-line tools, the playful loading animations in terminals, or the eye-catching README headers on GitHub projects. Even simple details, such as bold headings, arrows, or stylish dividers, draw inspiration from the rich world of ASCII traditions.
In more advanced contexts, ANSI art incorporates color and formatting, utilizing escape codes to create vibrant compositions directly within terminals. While it’s not as widespread as its ASCII counterpart, ANSI still finds a warm embrace among certain subcultures, especially within retro computing, game modding, and the exciting world of “demoscene” circles, where art is crafted under fascinating technical constraints as a creative challenge.
Modern developers use ASCII and ANSI art in various ways. CLI tools and developer utilities often display ASCII logos or banners to showcase branding when commands are executed. Frameworks like figlet, toilet, and cowsay are still used to add a touch of personality to console environments. Terminal dashboards and monitoring tools like htop or custom shell scripts sometimes feature ASCII headers or icons to enhance readability or provide visual structure.
Code comments and documentation can incorporate ASCII diagrams or block art to visually explain architecture or flow, particularly in environments where images aren’t practical. It's common to see GitHub READMEs and project wikis featuring fun ASCII titles or simple wireframes. This approach adds a creative touch that helps projects stand out while effectively communicating intent or humor, especially in the world of open-source tooling.
Artistic projects based entirely on ASCII aesthetics continue to be shared across platforms like asciiart.eu, Text-Image.com, and even Reddit’s r/ASCII_Art. Retro-inspired games and hacker-themed web designs sometimes use ASCII or ANSI art for menu screens, in-game cutscenes, or stylized intros, adding a layer of authenticity or charm.
ASCII art is also frequently used in creative coding and generative systems, where text-based output serves as a deliberate aesthetic choice. Developers can generate ASCII portraits using algorithms or create animations with simple text characters. Libraries like Python's art or JavaScript's ascii-art package allow for on-the-fly conversion of images or text into stylized blocks.
In today's world of AI art and high-resolution UIs, ASCII art maintains a special place due to its unique limitations. These constraints spark creativity, and the low fidelity of ASCII art offers a delightful flexibility. Moreover, it resonates with a distinct technical culture that treasures elegance, humor, and a touch of minimalism.
Whether you use it to create a unique CLI experience, personalize your GitHub profile, or simply enjoy retro aesthetics, ASCII and ANSI art serve as a playful yet timeless way to express yourself through code.
Code isn’t just about building apps, websites, and systems. It's also a fantastic way to create beautiful music! Programmatic music, also known as live coding music or algorithmic composition, enables developers to create captivating rhythms, melodies, harmonies, and structures using scripting languages and real-time coding. It’s a wonderful form of creative expression where the elegance of logic perfectly blends with artistic flair.
Unlike traditional music production, which often relies on audio samples and visual interfaces, programmatic music invites you to use text-based inputs to spark musical patterns and effects. This exciting approach presents a delightful and creative challenge: transforming your musical ideas into syntax. It encourages a mix of programming skills and musical imagination, opening the door to entirely new workflows, aesthetics, and performances that are just waiting to be discovered!
In many live coding environments, music comes alive as artists define patterns, sequences, loops, and transformations in real-time. The code runs continuously, so any updates are immediately reflected in the sound. The performer, or composer, adjusts tempo, rhythm, pitch, and timbre by editing the code on the fly, crafting a truly unique and engaging musical experience.
This model makes coding feel more like an improvisation, turning it into a joyful and interactive experience. It’s more like playing an instrument than just compiling a program, which makes the process feel lively and engaging. Everything is completely transparent, so you can see how it all comes together. During live coding performances, audiences enjoy seeing the code projected alongside the music, providing them with a unique opportunity to experience the creative process firsthand.
Several platforms have arisen to facilitate programmatic music creation. Each features a unique syntax, sound engine, and creative approach.
TidalCycles (or “Tidal”) is a Haskell-based language for live coding rhythmic sequences. It uses concise, pattern-oriented syntax to build complex rhythms, polyrhythms, and effects. It's popular in experimental electronic and algorithmic music scenes.
Strudel is a JavaScript-based, browser-friendly live coding environment inspired by Tidal. Strudel is beginner-friendly, easy to set up, and highly interactive—perfect for teaching, exploration, and casual jamming in a code sandbox.
Built on Ruby, Sonic Pi is designed to make music coding accessible to learners, educators, and performers. It includes built-in samples and synths, making it easy to create everything from simple melodies to complex layered compositions.
Last, but not least, we have FoxDot, a Python-based live coding system that integrates with SuperCollider (a sound synthesis engine), blending musical expressiveness with a syntax familiar to many developers. However, it hasn't been actively maintained for several years, leaving its future uncertain. But all hope is not lost. Renardo is a fork of FoxDot, aiming to continue its legacy and keep the tool current with modern developments.
Each of these tools is open source, well-documented, and supported by vibrant communities of artist-developers who share compositions, performance recordings, and even collaborative code jams.
Programmatic music can be more than just a hobby. It can become part of your identity as a developer and enrich your content ecosystem. You can share your coding sessions on Twitch or YouTube as ambient music streams, coding music sessions, or digital concerts. You can create educational content explaining how you structure a song in TidalCycles or build synth effects in Sonic Pi, combining programming tutorials with music theory. You can share code-based tracks on platforms like GitHub, SoundCloud (with audio exports), or community wikis. You can incorporate programmatic music snippets into interactive art pieces, portfolio websites, or game prototypes. Alternatively, you can join communities, participate in projects like TOPLAP (a collective of live coders and algorithmic artists), or submit to events such as Algoraves and Code Jams.
For developers, music created through code can be not just a cool idea, but an exciting and inspiring tool. It offers a fresh perspective on how we see software, not just as a practical utility, but as a creative medium. This reminds us that technical skills aren't limited to work or making money—they can also be fun, expressive, and truly personal. It's a wonderful way to blend technology, art, and passion.
Like generative art, programmatic music provides an opportunity to learn through experimentation, share your process openly, and connect with an audience that appreciates both creativity and coding. Whether you’re composing live loops, building your synths, or just exploring rhythm and randomness, programmatic music can become a distinctive and rewarding part of your brand.
Writing code is more than just developing software; it’s a wonderful form of creative expression and a heartfelt way to share your ideas. Whether you're crafting a helpful plugin, designing generative art, contributing to open source, or live-coding a musical performance, you're creating something that offers value beyond just your screen.
As a developer, your code has the incredible power to educate, inspire, entertain, and forge connections with others. Every library, demo, or pattern you share becomes a meaningful way to connect with fellow programmers, mentors, collaborators, or future employers. These public projects not only showcase your technical skills but also highlight your curiosity, generosity, and enthusiasm for being part of a lively community.
Don’t wait for your code to be “perfect.” Start small—perhaps with a GitHub gist, a CodePen sketch, or fixing a bug in your favorite open-source project. Over time, your collection of public code can grow into a rich portfolio of ideas, influence, and creativity.
This content started purely in a human mind, in terms of topic, structure, and end-goal. About half-way through, I gave in to the temptation and started using ChatGPT to provide suggestions and possible ways to expand and improve the content. The end result was enhanced using Grammarly to remove errors, fix punctuation, and fine-tune my non-native English. This process places the current content at Level 3 on the AI transparency framework as defined by Josh LaMar on the UX Collective blog.