Okay, so today I messed around with something called “chen alexander”. Honestly, I didn’t even know what it was at first. I just saw the name floating around and thought, “Why not?”.
First, I googled it. You know, the usual. Typed in “chen alexander” and saw a bunch of stuff pop up. Mostly academic-looking papers, which, let’s be real, are not my usual cup of tea.
But I kept digging. I scrolled through a few pages, and I started to get the gist. It seemed like some kind of mathematical thingy, maybe related to…shapes? Or paths? It was all very abstract.
Then I found some code examples. Mostly in Python, which is good, because I can at least read Python, even if I’m not a coding wizard.
I copied one of the simpler examples and pasted it into my trusty code editor. I hit “run,” and… nothing. Error messages! Classic.
Turns out I was missing a library. Something called “numpy”. I quickly did “pip install numpy”. Then ran the program again.
Bingo! It worked! Well, sort of. It spit out a bunch of numbers. I stared at them for a while, trying to make sense of it all. Then I adjusted some of parameters. And the program output more numbers.
I played around with it for a good hour, changing numbers here and there, seeing what would happen. Honestly, I still don’t fully get it, but it was kind of fun to see the numbers change. It felt like I was poking at something complex and mysterious.
I decided to try a different example, one that was supposed to draw something. This time, I needed another library, “matplotlib”. So, another “pip install matplotlib” and I was back in business.
This time, when I ran the code, a window popped up with… a squiggly line! Progress! It wasn’t pretty, but it was definitely something.
I tweaked the code again, changing the parameters, and the line changed. It got longer, shorter, curlier, straighter. It was like having a little digital Etch A Sketch.
My Takeaway
So, after a few hours of messing around, do I understand “chen alexander”? Not really. But I did have fun exploring. It was like solving a little puzzle, and it’s always satisfying to get something to work, even if you don’t fully grasp the underlying theory. Maybe I’ll come back to it another day and try to learn more, but for now, I’m calling it a win. I installed something, I ran some code, I saw some squiggly lines, and I didn’t break anything. That’s a good day in my book.
