This year, I’ve decided to throw some pots.

The pots so far:

• Pot 1 – A random chooser. (OCaml, Text web front end.)

As you can see in the picture, I literally threw some pots. It was messy, exciting and rewarding. The two you see above are the survivors of at least ten balls of clay, slapped down and shaped over four hours. A third came close, but then dried with a crack in the bottom.

But these aren’t the pots that I meant. There’s a suspiciously neat story that goes as follows:

A pottery teacher split his students into two groups for a year long course.

To the first group he said that he would grade them according to three pots. At the end of the year submit three pots. That’s all. If you do nothing except three perfect pots, you’ll get top grade.

To the second group he said that he would grade them by quantity. Submit one hundred pots and you’ll get top grade. One hundred lumpy, mismatched, leaky, downright ugly pots – it doesn’t matter. As long as you hit the number you’ll make the grade. If you submit three sublimely proportioned, exhibition worthy pots – you’ll fail. It’s all about the numbers.

And then, the pay off is that at the end of the year the best pots came from the second group. The act of working had automatically honed their skills, yada yada yada.

So it’s neat. And like allegorical stories there’s a clear message but don’t look too hard at the details. Particularly, don’t look too hard at the ethics of the teacher.

But it’s a useful shorthand. So this year I decided that I’d throw twenty-six coding pots. One every fortnight. Remembering it’s quantity over quality I wouldn’t have too many rules, but let’s try:

• Each pot has to be shared on Github, and be executable.
• It has to do something.
• It can build on a previous pot, but should be self contained.
• It should teach me something new.

So there I am, with a year of clay stretching out. Let’s see what I can make.