More crochet/programming thoughts

Here I am again, writing about crochet and programming! I’ve continued creating my tons of shitty stitches cute creatures.

New Git analogy! The crochet lifeline

First Git/crochet analogy.

I read a great crochet book about creating your own amigurumi patterns: Créer ses propres modèles d’amigurumis au crochet by Clotilde Massot and Lise Grandjonc. One of its authors (Clotilde Massot) is a software developer who, among other things, published an octocat pattern that I bought and used… Anyway in the book they explain that when you create a pattern, you will probably have to undo your work several times. Undoing a round is easy if you have a stitch marker in the first stitch of the current/last round: you undo until you hit that stitch marker. But what about undoing several rounds? In that case, you’ll be better off if instead of using a stitch marker at the beginning of the current round, you use contrasting yarn stuck under the first stitch of each round. That yarn creates what the authors of the book call your lifeline!

Now, if that’s not a great analogy for commits and the ability to reset…

Communities of practice

If you’ve had the opportunity to attend or watch the wonderful useR! 2025 keynote talk of my rOpenSci colleague Yanina Bellini Saibene, you’ve heard of communities of practice. In her talk, Yani quoted Etienne Wenger who defined communities of practice as “groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do, and who interact regularly in order to learn how to do it better“. Yani mentioned her swimming team and English conversation club. Well, I found a community of practice for crochet: a stitch club at a local café! Participants meet up to crochet side by side, talking a lot about crochet: comparing yarns, exchanging tips, etc. The first time I went, we even started with a round of introductions where we said what each of us would work on during that meeting, which reminded me of rOpenSci coworking sessions where participants do exactly that.

Usefulness of seeing others’ work

I’ve worked on some patterns by Yan Schenkel a.k.a. Pica Pau. One cool aspect of the patterns is that they include a link to a gallery where anyone can upload pics of their take on each creature. So you can look at them, maybe seeing a crucial (to you) angle that’s absent from the pattern, noticing whether some “flaw” of your own project is present in others’ projects, comparing variations and picking what you prefer before you start, etc. For instance I stared at many pics of Alberto Seagull before making the legs for mine.

The usefulness of seeing others’ crocheted animals reminds me of how reading and reviewing open-source, or our colleagues’, code helps us (and LLMs, I suppose) learn how to do, or not to do, some things, how it help us refine our taste! Ironically, I do publish most of my code, but I haven’t had interest in doing that for my crocheting yet. 😸

Conclusion

In summary, I keep finding excuses to talk about crochet. My pink octocat approves!