“The Art of Code” Workshops with fwdays to support Ukraine

Ukraine is a wonderful country. I’ve been there many times, speaking at conferences and meeting Ukrainian developers; it’s a fascinating place to visit, and one I was very much looking forward to revisiting when the pandemic was over. What is happening there right now is horrific. Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion, and the death and destruction that his actions have inflicted on the people of Ukraine, are unforgivable.

Donations of money are very, very welcome, whether to help equip the Ukrainian military or to assist humanitarian efforts providing medical assistance, transportation, and support to the millions of people who have lost their homes and livelihoods.

But the people I know in Ukraine are also working really hard to keep the Ukrainian economy working: delivering services, paying salaries, paying taxes. Over the past few years, I’ve run lots of online workshops with the crew from fwdays. Theyre obviously not able to run any of their regular conferences and in-person training at the moment, so instead they’re organising a series of online workshops with all the profits going to support humanitarian and defence causes in Ukraine.

To help them out with this, I’m running a series of half-day workshops based around ideas from my talk “The Art of Code” and the idea of programming as a creative art form – and I’ll be donating all my fees from these workshops to support Ukraine.

We’ll be kicking off on April 14th with a workshop about ray tracing in JavaScript. During four hours of live hands-on coding, we’ll build a fully featured ray tracer, in pure JavaScript, that runs directly in your web browser. You’ll learn the principles of 3D computer graphics, and how to simulate lighting, shading, reflection, and visual effects to create photo-realistic scenes. Not only that, but along the way you’ll learn about some state-of-the-art JavaScript and web technologies, including the HTML Canvas API, web worker, ES modules, clamped arrays, and many more.

Tickets are on sale now, with prices starting from UAH2534 (about £65/€75). It will all be online, using Zoom, Slack, GitHub, and various web-based collaboration tools. Find out more and book now at:

https://fwdays.com/en/event/the-art-of-code-ray-tracing-in-java-script

Any questions about it? Find me on Twitter or drop me an email at dylan@dylanbeattie.net.

We’ll have more workshops coming up soon, covering everything from designing esoteric programming languages to fractal geometry and Conway’s Game of Life, so keep an eye out for those. You’ll learn some useful real-world programming techniques, you’ll discover fun, creative, and inspirational ways to apply those techniques – and you’ll be helping to support Ukraine.

Hope to see you there.