On making art with code
Jeffrey Arts is a developer and artist, using the web and the art of computer generated shapes as inspiration for his works.
Jeffrey Arts is a developer and artist, using the web and the art of computer generated shapes as inspiration for his works.
In his view, he views the backend and frontend as two separate worlds, each with their own complexity and underlying systems. Within the Front-end world, for example, is deployment, which in turn consists of various components such as Git, NPM, .env, ChatGPT, Bash, and Yarn.
He approaches deployment as something that is not directly related to front-end development, but at the same time is essential for the entirety of his work. Within this domain he sees two distinct 'bubbles':
Localhost deployment with pa2: He uses his own script with which he can get a website online within two minutes. He is very proud of this. His main goal is to personalize his working method so that it works optimally for him.
Server deployment with Yarn: Here he uses his own tools and workflows to bring his developed projects to production.
He makes extensive use of frameworks, but at the same time attaches great importance to understanding the basic principles, such as vanilla JavaScript. He consciously chooses not to always use frameworks such as React with JSX, because he wants to follow his own working methods and preferences.
His toolbox workflow is focused on creating his own ecosystem, sticking to core technologies as much as possible. For him, development not only means efficiency, but also a trade-off between costs and benefits.
I was inspired by the way he utilises a toolkit he wrote by himself, for himself, where he has a sort of boilerplate of all the things he knows he likes to use. He runs it from the terminal and can easily start up a new project without having to manually set up the framework and packages of use. I've something like this only not quite as technical; I literally just made an Express app with the structure I prefer (using CSS components and the like) and saved a blank copy of this on my device under a folder called 'templates' that I duplicate. This already has the server set up and all as well.
I find myself a lot in his desire to find what works for him. I wish to achieve this myself and I'd hope to also be able to write something like his terminal script.