I have watched so many hours of Dan's videos because he inspires a fervency of the acquisition of knowledge. I absolutely wish that I had his videos whenever I was first starting to program. His attitude is so endearing as it is clear that he simply can't contain his excitement about programming.
His Youtube channel used to be called "Coding Rainbow", but he was unfortunately forced to change it. He really does a great job at capturing the sense of wonder that "Reading Rainbow" inspired in me as a kid.
I just watched him last weekend - he triggers the curious learner, without avoiding mistakes, and walking as a discoverer he teaches difficult concepts with fun.
Hope he really launches some big online learning thing covering more areas.
To maybe save people a bit of time who do what I did:
The video compositing library seems to no longer have a main website.
The video drawing library, popcorn.js was run by mozilla but they no longer maintain it. There is a fork however. On the github page for this, it links to a js fiddle to try it out which fails to do the simple demo. The reason it fails is because the location it's pulling popcorn.js from is now just serving up HTML (js fiddle could make this clearer there's an issue). You may have to try things out locally to get it working.
I really love Processing (and its derivative P5.js) but I never really have any ideas to what to build with these tools in order to get truly dexterous and acquainted with them. I’ve recently set myself the goal of implementing the ”Wave Function Collapse Algorithm” (https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse/blob/master/RE...) in P5.js as a kind of catalyst to get me going.
The algorithm was discovered/invented by analogy to Quantum Mechanics (with which it shares many similarities, but also important differences: the algorithm deals with probabilities, while the actual quantum physics deals with amplitudes, of which probabilities are the square).
Most of the stuff on that repository dates back about a year, and I first read about it about then here on Hacker News, but searching for the actual article has me swamped with references to quantum mechanics and physics.
Anyway, it has very general and broad applications indeed. Audio, 3D voxel spaces, et cetera, beyond the obvious 2D pixel space.
To everybody interested, check out paper.js. It's also programmatic design but everything can be an object, making animations/interactivity easier, along with some other neat features.
Unrelated to the article itself, but I hate how it hijacks the scroll to add some kind of easing. It adds nothing and just made reading through the article feel weird
I put together a very crude scaffold for p5 a long time ago in hopes it might encourage students to dive in and edit code, share/remix. It was an aid to teach client/server things but hopefully have a point to it.
https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman/