What do Viking needlework, the Apollo guidance computer, and a $7 Etsy crochet pattern have in common? More than you’d think. In this episode of the MonkCast, Kate Holterhoff talks with Abbey Perini, web developer at Hygiena, technical writer, and prolific crafter, about the tangled history of fiber arts and programming. Abbey walks through a condensed version of her CodeMash talk, from the earliest knitted scraps around 6500 BCE to the women who wove core rope memory for NASA and got written off as “little old lady” needleworkers. Along the way she makes the case that the Jacquard loom gets too much credit, that knitting patterns really are programs (loops, debugging, DRY and all), and that AI slop has already found its way into crochet. The conversation closes on something quieter: why building a physical thing still matters when so much of our work disappears the moment we close the laptop.
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Transcript
Kate Holterhoff (00:04)
Hello, my name is Kate Holterhoff. I am a senior analyst at RedMonk, and with me today I have Abbey Perini. So excited to talk to her. she is a web dev and technical writer at Hygiena and I you know, she’s a local Atlantan, so we get to hang out all the time recently at Vueconf, which was which was a lot of fun.
Abbey Perini (00:24)
It was. It was a good time.
Kate Holterhoff (00:26)
I invited Abbey on here specifically to talk to me about something that I’d never heard of before, which is the relationship between fiber arts and programming. And I think we’re all kind of familiar broad strokes with the Jacquard loom and, punch cards and all of this. So, I I I knew there was something there. But apparently, Abbey’s been doing a deep dive on all this and I I wanted to hear more. So I invited her on the show to tell me.
All the things she’s been learning.
She is gonna be doing something a little different than we typically do on the MonkCast, which is giving us kind of a condensed version of a presentation that she gave at CodeMash.
And it’s on the history of fiber arts here.
So I’m gonna be mostly quiet while she talks about it. And then we’re gonna get into questions afterwards. And I’m super jazzed for the depth that this is going to bring to our conversation here. So yeah, we’re we’re trying it out.
but before we dig into all that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What do you do? what are you excited about?
Abbey Perini (01:23)
so I started learning code in twenty twenty. I’ve been in the industry for about six years now, and as part of boot camp I was challenged to start writing and so I started doing a lot of technical writing.
And people liked that for some reason and that took off. So now I have something over 500,000 views. I stopped counting at that point, but I love explaining technical concepts to beginners, laymen, things like that. It’s something that I excel at. And that naturally turned into speaking at conferences because as Kate knows our Atlanta tech community really loves making people speak in front of crowds. So that is how I got here. And
And Kate and I were talking at one of those conferences about hobbies and crafts and things like that, and I do a lot of crafts. It’s it’s definitely one of my interests. So we started talking about a workshop I had given at CodeMash in January where I taught people how to knit and crochet and gave this talk that I’m about to summarize for y’all. what else am I up to? I don’t even know. I
Kate Holterhoff (02:32)
What are you crafting right now? What are you building? You know? Is it something for DragonCon?
What are you doing?
Abbey Perini (02:36)
Yeah.
Yes. Multiple things. I’m about to finish a pair of socks and from knitting and then I’m working on costumes from Slay the Spire II. So I’m sewing my husband a cloak and then I have to make some sort of crazy wrap dress thing for my costume, as well as all the all the other projects. I have mutual friend of ours, Kayla, 3D printing a bunch of things for me so that I can then build on top of it to create all these masks and stuff, and hopefully I’m going to use what I learned at CodeMash and put electronics in there.
Kate Holterhoff (02:38)
Ha ha ha.
Abbey Perini (03:07)
so that it lights up so fingers crossed. Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (03:10)
Wow. Wow.
And for folks who aren’t familiar, what is CodeMash exactly? It sounds a little bit different from a lot of tech conferences.
Abbey Perini (03:16)
Yeah, so a lot of conferences will be in a Kalahari, which is an indoor water park, and CodeMash, I believe, was one of the first ones to do it. It’s in Ohio, in Sandusky, which is an hour out of Cleveland, I think. Please don’t come for me if I don’t know my Ohio geography. I’ve been twice. but it is not just
Kate Holterhoff (03:32)
Mm-hmm.
Abbey Perini (03:42)
focused like one tool. Like we we love Vueconf. That’s focused on one tool, but it’s focused on pretty much anything about programming. There will be two or three talks at a time, lots of speakers, lots of stuff going on, and then also an entire maker space. So I took Electronics 101 and intro to soldering. I can finally solder and I taught fiber arts classes as well as there’s a whole 3D printing lab. People sell stuff. There’s game n the game room is
addictive and concerning, I would be like, my god, it’s like 1130, I have to go to bed. But one more game. Just one more game in the game room. so it’s it’s a really cool conference. It’s very diverse, it’s very varied. and I had a great time. Even though you know the more time you spend in a Kalahari, the more you feel like you’re in a liminal space and you’re just like leaving a piece of yourself there and you’re like, my landmarks are the sassy giraffe and the gorilla. Where am I? What’s happening?
Kate Holterhoff (04:29)
Amazing.
I don’t see problem with this. I wanna that’s the liminal space I wanna occupy. So hey, I I’m into it. that sounds incredible. I have not been, but you’re you’re certainly making me you know, codemash curious here. This is sounds like a good time. Yeah.
Abbey Perini (04:43)
Yeah.
I’m actually curious. It’s my job. Yeah, and
then I think I’m speaking I’m speaking at Nebraska Code this month, K C D C in September and Tech Bash in October.
Kate Holterhoff (05:11)
Phenomenal. This is exciting. okay, so you’re doing all the things. You’re traveling a bunch. I’m glad you you could carve out a little time to tell me all this cool stuff that you’ve been researching in relation to fiber art. So yeah, I mean, so let’s I I don’t even know where to dig in here. so you know, let me just be preface this by saying you do have a blog post about this as well.
Abbey Perini (05:20)
I know.
Yes.
Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (05:34)
So,
you know, for folks who w who who need to research further, that’d be a good place to start. but maybe let’s just begin with the the the the Vikings, right? Okay, so so yeah, t t talk to me about you know, where where all this began.
Abbey Perini (05:49)
Yeah. yeah, I do need to update that blog post is on my to-do list of the thousand things I’m I need to do. okay, so fiber arts themselves are anything that you’re creating with yarn, string, and thread, right? So crochet and knitting people usually know about, embroidery, weaving, macrame, felting, quilting, sewing, basket weaving, rug hooking, lace, textile arts, jewelry, like anything you’re making with thread. And the earliest one that we know about is Viking Nalbending, which
Kate Holterhoff (05:52)
no.
Abbey Perini (06:19)
It used a bone needle.
And to like sew in between the loops of thread, and it comes out looking a lot like what we expect from knitting, right? and so this is just the earliest scrap we’ve found from about 6500 BCE. but textile arts have been a huge part of human culture for a very long time. We’re wearing clothes right now. We’ve been wearing clothes for a while. Clothes were necessary for survival. So since the dawn of civilization, we’ve been doing that, but.
But the Han Dynasty in China from about 206 BCE to 220 CE, we saw the draw loom really become a big thing. And the textile arts surrounding that and looms as a whole just come about during that time. And we think now these days, because it’s so ubiquitous and we don’t think about, you know, fast fashion, we just buy clothes, like a lot of us don’t think about where they come from or how they were made or the technology behind that. So a lot of people don’t realize that these.
These are like a trade, just like carpentry or anything like that. You produce things that can help you survive, improve your quality of life, or sell. And people also don’t realize that fiber arts have been used as spy tradecraft. So as an espionage. So during World War II, the British government banned knitting patterns, fearing that they could communicate information to the Germans. And when I update that blog, I will add a link to a very, very cool piece of writing about the covert role of knitting.
Knitting
during the French Revolution because people kind of know about the ladies’ knitting during all of the executions, but they don’t know what that was about. Because they don’t really remember that fire arts used to be required for survival. People used to be making things all the time. So, one of my favorite examples, although it was a very bad time for the Irish, so maybe favorite isn’t a great word for that, was Irish crochet lace during the potato famine. up to 20,000 girls.
We’re being paid to make Irish crochet and they were selling them across Europe and America. And so eventually whole families turned it into a cottage industry. They would protect their designed motifs so that nobody else knew how to make the special motifs that they were making, the little patterns in the lace. And then they would take all of the things that they were that they had made and turn them into a lace making center in town, and then they would be turned into like you know, wedding gowns, coats to go over for you know, just to jazz up your outfit, things like that.
Until we figured out how to mass produce lace. Another great example is Coast Salish knitting. I know that you have seen a Cowichan sweater, I don’t think I pronounced that word correctly, but they became really, really popular in the 80s, and white women turned them into a bunch of patterns, and so they took they moved away from the traditional motifs. But the Salish Coast, which is the West Coast of Canada, Indigenous peoples, had come up with these beautiful patterns with these motifs that were
Special to them as a way to survive and to sell in the colonial economy that they had been forced into. So
All of that to say that we don’t remember how much of an impact fiber arts have had on us as humans. And so that that story of how fiber arts and computing come to g came together has really been lost as well. Because programming today wouldn’t exist without fiber. Everybody, as you said, knows about the Jacquard Loom. There’s one in the Mimms Museum in Atlanta in Roswell where you can go and they’ll do demonstrations.
Of them using the punch cards to make textiles using the Jacquard Loom, and it made it easy to quickly and easily change the pattern of textiles, but it reduced the weaver from a coder of weaves to an operator stepping on a pedal.
And the reason that people most a lot of programmers know about the Jacquard Loom is because there’s an Ada Lovelace quote that is, we may say most aptly that the analytical engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. But calling the Jacquard Loom the ancestor of the modern computer is a misconception, right? It’s the end of the story because mechanical harnesses were used in looms in Persia almost 2,000 years earlier. A small wooden cylinder with a circular
Linen strip with wooden pegs glued to it was the Upper Austria’s version in the 17th century. But the Jacquard loom was the first machine to use punched cards, which is why a lot of people associate it with the computer because we had those computers that used punched cards. But the Jacquard loom doesn’t work algebraically, it’s really great for like portraits and pictures, it addresses each strand individually, so like each pixel in an image, essentially, instead of making these
Patterns that are repeatable, which is what weaving had been up until that point. And we we’ve talked a lot about Luddites recently because of the whole AI thing, but like textile manufacturers weren’t impressed by the Jacquard Loom. It was very inflexible, they didn’t see a cost benefit. It made operating loom much more physically demanding and really faster. The thing that it did speed up was preparing the loom and changing the patterns, which historically had taken a lot of time. But if you just produce the same thing a lot, like you don’t have
To change the pattern a lot, so the trade-offs weren’t really there for them. The real ancestor of the modern computer was weaving notation. So in the 18th century, books made the art of weaving public. They used standardized binary notation and algebraic patterns, and the Jacquard loom turned that into punch cards, which was a visible thing that engineers could see. So they had these books and they had the punch cards and they were like, we can use.
This is to create automated looms and eventually computers. So the Jacquard Loom punch cards transferred binary notation and algebraic thinking from the brains of weavers to calculating engines. And there’s another quote that I have from a 1976 computer science book where they’re talking about how weaving is in particular important in our present-day advance from serial to parallel processing. Weaving, in contrast to mathematics, is a naturally parallel process.
and might give us more ideas than we think. But Kate, when I talk about fiber arts, do you think of it as highly skilled labor?
Kate Holterhoff (12:53)
No, I tend to think of like folks doing crafts, you know? I mean it seems to be enjoyable, something that I see my friends have picked up a lot of during COVID, as something to keep their hands busy, maybe while they’re watching garbage T V or, if they have to sit through something that maybe is a little boring, they you know, they’ll they’ll
but but let me just throw out here as someone who who cannot do it, has not learned, I’m I’m deeply envious because it it looks very cool. So
Abbey Perini (13:15)
Pick up pick up anything.
Yeah, I mean happy to share my one on one docs, happy to have a Atlanta tech knitting circle forum you know. But we see that pattern through a lot of different traditionally thought of as female
Kate Holterhoff (13:33)
Love this. All right, it’s a date, yeah.
Abbey Perini (13:45)
Pastimes or jobs or anything like that, like women’s labor is often undervalued to the point of the way that we talk about it. So when we talk about how MIT hired women to weave core rope memory, and that was used in the Apollo program, it’s referred to as little old lady memory or space age needleworkers. And people have forgotten that this was an early form of RAM that made the block two Apollo guidance computer possible. It had eight
18 times more storage than magnetic core memory, and was the standard solution at the time, but it required people weaving core rope to get it to work, and you had to weave it in a way that made it possible for the memory to be stored. So women like Hilda Carpenter, who assembled core rope memory for the iconic whirlwind computer developed at MIT, were mostly uncredited and forgotten. I mean, this is a story that we see throughout history, like the original programmers for the ENIAC
I think it’s called, were credited as models. Like they were like, yeah, they’re just standing next to the computer to make it look good in these photos. And it’s like they were they were programming it. They’re the only reason it worked. And they weren’t even invited to dinner to celebrate the like first successful person presentation after, or credited or their names were lost to history. So people have come together and created things like a core memory rope quilt, where they have w woven the core memory rope and then made that into a quilt, and when it’s activated with electricity,
It plays audio recordings and sends tweets detailing firsthand accounts of the Apollo project. And we have fiber arts influencing programming and computers and everything, but that relationship goes both ways because as technology gets better and better, we use it in a variety of ways that we wouldn’t have expected.
And there’s one artist that I highlight in my talk called Jovencia de la Paz, and he is a weaver artist who uses a digital loom to write unique patterns and software that generate patterns algorithmically. So the textile sort of grows based on algorithmic ideas. I encourage people to look him up. It is very cool 3D fiber arts that are creating all these little squares and diamonds and patterns. Very awesome. I myself took part in a project called Granny Life Crochet that is currently hanging
In the Maison de Pancaré Museum in Paris, and all the community members came together and made individual crochet squares. If you’ve ever seen one of those crochet blankets that’s made out of squares, that’s called a granny square. And so the pattern, the way you make the square is the same every time, but there was a web app that generated different digital patterns for each square, so where you would put the color versus the white. And so we have this beautiful double sided blanket made by
whole community and everything about it pattern wise was generated using math that I don’t understand. people talk a lot about knitting machines, crochet machines do exist, but it’s it’s a little bit harder to automate crochet because it’s more of a building rather than a weaving or knitting which is more like fabric. and just cause I crocheted for
many years before I picked up knitting, I do have to talk about crochet hyperbolic planes. So mathematicians couldn’t figure out how to model like coral, hyperbolic planes that form in nature. They were like, I don’t I can’t make this work until the crocheters were like, We got this. Crochet is perfect for modeling hyperbolic planes and coral. So you can see huge crochet coral reefs by Christina Margaret Wertham. and then you can pick up their patterns and make your own. Those are in
Kate Holterhoff (17:22)
Wow.
Abbey Perini (17:36)
Museums. But a lot of people, when they think of programming and knitting, they think about computational knitting. So we have these knitting machines, they have a bunch of needles, and they’ll just print out almost like 3D printing whatever you program into them. So if you generate a pattern, that’s computational knitting. And then if you had a knitting machine and they stopped supporting them and you were at all tech savvy, you would then hack the knitting machine to make sure that you could still.
Knit despite the fact that nobody was creating software for it anymore. So that became pretty common when there was a boom of knitting machines, and then they were like, we’re not into this anymore, we’re gonna stop supporting them or making them or anything like that. And then I have talked to a company that does it’s now loopscape. They do their technology is called stereo knit and they create sustainable, reduce waste on-demand 3D knit technology. So the whole point is to program it so that you don’t
have to like when you’re sewing when you do anything but a rectangle you are inherently wasting fabric right because you’ll have like a weird triangle that you can’t use for anything else that you’ll have to toss whereas 3D knitting uses exactly the materials that it needs there’s no waste and it’s a great sustainable like the opposite of fast fashion right
But one of the big things that people don’t really think about because it’s been around for so many years at this point is how Ravelry, the website, affected knitting and crochet in around the world. So I talked to a lot of local yarn store owners because I like if I go to a new place, I’m like, hey, let me go grab a local skin of yarn, which is how we end up with this much yarn. And when the website came on the scene, it was the first time.
That people had a central place to share all of these patterns and techniques in PDFs in whatever language they wanted and talk about these crafts. And this created an explosion of interest in innovation in 2007. And knitters and crocheters are now primarily 25 to 35 years old. So before Ravelry and after Ravelry are like night and day for local yarn store owners. They’re like, Yeah, you know, we were scraping by, and then all of a sudden, Ravelry came on the scene, and then
Everyone wanted to learn how to knit and crochet. We we saw an explosion of interest. So now there are indie dying dyed yarn is a huge thing. Fiber shows and festivals have good attendance. But as an accessibility enthusiast, I do have to point out that when they redi redesigned their site, they did exactly what you’re not supposed to do with accessibility. and there’ll be a whole blog linked in that when I share that new updated blog.
Kate Holterhoff (20:24)
Yeah. Huh.
Abbey Perini (20:26)
Alright, so I know you program. How do you how do you think patterns and programs are similar, just off the top of your head?
Kate Holterhoff (20:38)
man. Well, it seems like there’s something about like discrete components, right, that are reusable. And so I I get the impression that it’s almost like cooking, where it’s like you can follow these directions to ensure that you’re gonna get the the result that you’ve been promised. So in in my mind, it’s about like ensuring that you have the units that you need to
have a particular result. and so yeah, if I’m doing any sort of coding project that feels very similar to what I see knitters doing when they are just kind of repeating a l you know, a loop to ensure that they eventually get this, you know, sweater or whatever their pattern has promised them.
Abbey Perini (21:22)
Exactly on point per usual. yeah, so the pattern is like a program and the finished object is like the output. And so we can use patterns to teach like pattern tracing, you know? my finished object doesn’t look like the picture. Where did I go wrong in following these instructions? Or were the instructions wrong? Like those kinds of things. good pattern writers use d dry, don’t repeat yourself, so making those discrete components. and then
Patterns are QA tested for correctness, scalability, the look of the finished project. They’re done by testers following the pattern and technical editors. They have people coming in who are like, using these acronyms that are commonly known would be better and make this more succinct, and they have a whole profession around that, just like we have QA and technical writers. Pattern developers often prefer open source software like Dark Table, GIMP, Libre, Stitch Mastery, and then like assembly languages.
Are pushed and popped onto the tool. There have even been markup languages and Java languages and Lisp languages for putting out a knitting pattern. When you go to debug a pattern, you look at logical errors, which would be runtime in a program, or following the pattern didn’t give you the expected finished object, like I was just talking about, or interface errors with components or
Modules of a program communicating inner incorrectly that would be like spelling errors or confusing inconsistencies in the pattern, encoding errors, difficulty processing the program’s script versus a mismatch in communication styles. So, like I don’t like following charts because it’s a big grid and you have to remember what row you’re on, and then you have to match that up to the picture, and like I like I prefer written instructions. So if there was a a pattern that only had charts, I would probably skip it and do something else because it’s just a mismatch in.
how I like to do things. there can be memory leaks, which we know what memory leaks are in programming, but like things that overwhelm the crafter short-term memory. So if you’re having to remember too many repeats, too many things going on, that can also be very problematic.
they I mentioned charts, program patterns use charts, just like Python and JavaScript use symbols and keywords to tell a computer what the desired output is. The pattern is telling you, the human, what they want with symbols. and then we there there’s been a lot of research around using fiber crafting and as a way to teach computation. So it would be different materials for different concepts, so like weaving was better for the performance of automation and fabric manipulation for 3D modeling, but
Especially like for and while loops. They’re used a lot in knitting and crochet patterns. But a while loop is described as like until. So you keep doing something until something else happens. And that’s a much easier intro to while loops than a lot of the ways that while loops are explained in like teaching programming. So we have seen that programmers can learn not only from the patterns themselves, but the way that the online community has developed.
standards for iteration conditions, documenting design, and explaining things to beginners because s over time knitting patterns have evolved to precise line-by-line procedures that are akin to programs. And then I can I can give a few examples of how you can get even further into like combining programming and fiber arts, but that’s that’s pretty much the presentation I gave at CodeMash and yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (25:12)
Amazing. No,
thank you for doing this. so I have lots of questions.
Abbey Perini (25:18)
Good.
Kate Holterhoff (25:19)
First question. So
Abbey Perini (25:20)
Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (25:20)
it seems like a real tension here has to do with like automation versus craft and and the intrinsic good of crafting. so talk to me I mean, I feel like there’s a natural fit with AI here. Can you talk to me about how AI has maybe disrupted the fiber craft industry and like, what’s your take on on that that tension? Like where where does it come from?
Abbey Perini (25:42)
So the main thing that people are complaining about right now is AI generated patterns that so they in generate an image and then the AI is supposed to generate the instructions for how to make the thing in the image.
Kate Holterhoff (25:49)
Okay.
Abbey Perini (25:56)
And there’ll be things like, it’s a doll and it has legs. And then the pattern itself won’t tell you how to make the legs at all. Or it’ll just be such gobbledygook because people can generate them extremely fast. And so they’re like, I’m just gonna put this up on Etsy is a common place to go, Ravelry a lot, so you’ll pay seven dollars and then have to be like this doesn’t even this doesn’t do as described, and there’s not a lot of ways to keep these people responsible, right? You give
them a bunch of one-star reviews on their Etsy store, they’ll just go and open another one and do it all over again. So even beyond
You know, I I saw an article this morning that was describing like vibe coders as builders and people who care about code craft as keepers or something, which isn’t inherently like they’re the gatekeepers or something. But like there’s a difference between, I like I just care about the doing the craft by hand. I mean there’s the constant joke about crafters where like sure I could buy it for thirty dollars, but I would rather spend twenty hours of my life and eighty dollars.
Kate Holterhoff (26:46)
Yeah, really.
Abbey Perini (27:04)
Making it, but it’s less about like I just demand that I have all handmade things, and more like this is something that I enjoy doing, it doesn’t inherently need to be productive or make me money, and when I go to a pattern, I expect that someone has made this thing before and tested it, and especially if I’m paying money for it. If it’s free, I don’t really care. But we’ve seen that people think, you know, you can just do it.
Not even put all your effort into it, not make sure it’s great. And then people don’t want to buy your patterns at that point. And when it was on a small scale, that was easy enough to be like, you can look out for this, you can look out for this. But like if you’re not AI literate and you can’t see that the hand holding the doll has seven fingers, like there’s no way for you to be like, this was definitely AI generated before you see the content of the pattern.
Kate Holterhoff (28:01)
man. So AI slop has come for the fiber arts community. I you know, thoughts and prayers. I don’t know. That’s Yeah, I know, you’re right. It is not shocking, but it’s it’s you always wonder like what the incentive structure is. Like I guess they’re just making enough money that that it’s worth the tokens to fool everybody. I mean, I don’t know. We’ll see. okay.
Abbey Perini (28:05)
Yeah. Definitely.
Not shocking, no.
We’ll see. We’ll see
what you search.
Kate Holterhoff (28:30)
Yeah, all right. So so AI, that’s the the obvious one. Do you have any other takes on like what is it? I mean, maybe this is about like developers in general. Like at RedMonk we’re always to understand developers. So help me to understand as a developer, what is it about crafting and crochet and all of these things that you are attracted to? Like what appeals to you about doing it?
Abbey Perini (28:34)
Yeah.
So you’re You’re talking about how it seems like you have a lot of people in tech who just like pick this up and it’s because it uses the same part of your brain. When I was in boot camp, I had to put down every fiber arts thing because it’s like you think about like, okay, you’re staring at a blank page. If you just start like it’s gonna be okay, run into that at the start of every single craft. you were talking about troubleshooting. Why isn’t it doing the exact same thing? Following l for loops and while loops and thinking about how the pattern
Kate Holterhoff (28:59)
Yes.
Mm.
Abbey Perini (29:24)
Should work just like a program. All of those things are the things that I look for in an interesting developer job, right? Like I am here to solve an interesting problem every single day. That is what keeps me in this job. And that’s what keeps me in fiber arts land as well. Like when I
Think about when I get a little bit bored with like, you know, knitting, I could switch to crochet, but when I get bored with both, then I pick up yet another type of knitting or crochet, right? Because like just having one skein of yarn and knitting something is knitting. But then there’s also using multiple colors called color work and double-sided knitting. So you knit both sides of a scarf at the same time and you have a pattern and it’s the inverse of each other, and like crochet as well has mosaic crochet that I have on my list to get into.
right now because it looks a lot like knitting. You can do the kinds of tiny color changes that it’s hard to do in crochet or like there’s a difference between crocheting a scarf or a blanket that’s flat and crocheting something that’s round like a hat or
a doll, just called Omigarumi and things like that. So there’s just just like in programming where there’s a thousand things you could be learning today and you will never ever be able to learn everything that there is to know about programming, n fiber arts give that as well. I know when I was working on one costume I was I was working on a a Queen Serenity Sailor Moon costume which has the iconic I think it was Dior dress with the gold embroidery around the the thing and I was like well
I’ll just pick up tambour embroidery because it’s the ancestor of crochet. So I can go, I can use basically a hook and go almost as fast as I can when I crochet instead of using an embroidery needle, which I always I love embroidery, but like I feel like I’m threading a needle constantly. It’s just like constantly coming off of the needle and like I wear nails so like it’s tiny and I’m just sitting there like just go in. Just
All the time. So also that like frustration and knowing when to put something down and stepping away is definitely something that I have learned from programming. Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (31:40)
man. Yeah, these are all good reasons. So it’s like it scratches that tinkerer itch. Like it it gives you something to mess with. And it also sounds like it’s just infinitely vast. Like there’s so much to learn. and that also, yeah, it’s like the best you can discover the best tool for the job, the the end result that you want to achieve. yeah, whether it’s like a different programming language or a different library or whatever, different framework. amazing.
Abbey Perini (32:01)
Yeah.
Yeah. I started
I started with Amigarumi, so the dolls, and when I the f I remember the first time I made something that I could like wear, like actually wear out as like a scarf or something like that, and I was just like, this is useful. I can use this. This is cool. And it was kind of the same feeling as that first time that I programmed a button that did something and then clicked it, and I was like, It did the thing. So like that same joy and dopamine rush.
Kate Holterhoff (32:29)
Yeah.
Very cool. so have you used then like ChatGPT or Claude to help you learn some of these new skills like tambour or whatever? No, not yet. What have you thought about it? Are other people in the community doing that?
Abbey Perini (32:50)
Maybe. I mean I don’t have use of statistics on how often like other people outside of tech are using things ’cause I’m I’m stuck in that tech media bubble, right? but I know Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (32:51)
Okay.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean it comes down to documentation, right? If it doesn’t if there isn’t enough written about it or if it’s like, you know, elsewhere in books or something, then it wouldn’t be in Claude to tell you how to do it right.
Abbey Perini (33:14)
Yeah, it’s interesting ’cause I’ve always been the person to like, okay, I don’t think I quite understand this, so I’ll just try and see what’s wrong with it. And other I have a Kathryn (Kat) Grayson Nanz was also at Vueconf and I was talking about how my first knitting pattern was a double sided knitting pattern with color work and she was just like, You’re a monster. Like why what do you mean? And so every time I’m like, You just just what what? Like it’s hard? Like Elle from
Kate Holterhoff (33:22)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Abbey Perini (33:40)
legally blonde. And people are like so it’s not really like I don’t normally go to like maybe someone else can summarize this in words. I’ll just bang my head against it until I can figure it out.
Kate Holterhoff (33:41)
Yes, yes.
Love that so much. okay. So long storied history with fiber arts. And so of I guess where where did you cut your teeth on them? Was it crocheting? Is that your first?
Abbey Perini (34:06)
It was crochet. My sister in law got me a Amigurumi book for Christmas and I made was his name and they believe it was Ferdinand the Frog. and he had like one leg was bigger than the other and like he kind of looks like a little bit like kill me but like I was like I made a thing. I followed the instructions and so then I like made some more things from the Amigurumi book. And my mom had been she’s a certified master knitter and she’s been knitting for a very very long time. But I always remember her like crafts constantly for like the birthdays like you know instead of going out and buying
Kate Holterhoff (34:17)
Okay.
Abbey Perini (34:43)
a bunch of store-bought decorations, she would handmake a bunch of stuff. and so it’s always been part of my life to like, okay, I can buy it, but like, do I want to make it? Does that seem like a fun thing for me to do? to the point that my husband is still asking where the paintings for our bedroom are a few years later after I started them, but you know, it’s a process.
Kate Holterhoff (35:05)
Hey, I know. Leonardo da Vinci carried around his things for years. Tell him to tell him to calm down. It’s you know, you got a masterpiece coming.
Abbey Perini (35:14)
So I spent like seven years being like, I have one hook, I’m a hooker, I’m crocheting, it’s not knitting, it’s hooking. And then I finally picked up knitting because I walked into Pearl’s Yarn Empor Emporium in Asheville and Rick, one of the owners, has one of those brains where you’re just like, I don’t know how you like the friend in high school where you’d be like, Can you help me with my math homework? And he’d be like, No, the answer’s seven. I don’t know how to get how to tell you how to get there.
Kate Holterhoff (35:19)
Mm-hmm.
Ha ha.
Abbey Perini (35:39)
He’s made like a scale model of the earth out of little knit triangles and like all the stuff. And so I walked in and the pattern was this scarf, this double knit scarf, that had a dungeon map on it. And so all of the DD monsters inside the dungeon had charms, and like you put them in the corresponding places on the map. And then it also had a DD adventure associated with it. So you’re able to run an entire DD one-shot from the scarf that you had knit. And I was like
Guess I have to learn knitting now. Everyone, yeah. so after that it’s been a lot of like that and like sewing for costumes, because I don’t typically get to follow a pattern from start to finish. Like, I do a lot of like anime animated stuff, video games, and so that’ll be stuff that doesn’t exist in real life, right? So you have to like take a pattern and then tack several things onto it and
Kate Holterhoff (36:09)
Yeah. And that was it.
Abbey Perini (36:38)
Or like change it dramatically. So I did I dressed up as Barbie for MagnoliaJS 2023 and I was mad because I had hand designed all the pleats for the skirt and they were half an inch crooked and no one is going to notice that, but I’m just sitting there just like furious and my husband was like, How many times have you actually done a sewing pattern at this point? Like from the just followed it with the instructions from start to finish. And so
it’s it’s always it’s less of a like, which craft did I start with and more that I have always had that kind of curiosity and wanting to tinker that goes so well with programming and probably why I fell in love with it like almost immediately.
Kate Holterhoff (37:26)
Okay.
And have you tried to do this you know, rope core memory thing, the little old lady technique? Is that is that on your list?
Abbey Perini (37:35)
That’s a good idea. No, I I c macrame, I feel like, is fairly similar. It’s a bunch of knots. I haven’t done
Weaving or spinning yet and I feel like that’s probably the next I joke about that you know, everybody’s gonna leave tech and run into the woods and then start a coffee shop or whatever. Mine is a alpaca farm and then I’m gonna take the fiber from my alpacas and then turn it into yarn and then once it’s spun maybe I’ll weave it or whatever. some of some of that is like where am I gonna put a loom? Or a wheel. but you know, I’ll I’ll figure it out. there’s always there’s always something to learn.
Kate Holterhoff (37:53)
Yes. Yes.
Abbey Perini (38:12)
It was it was funny when I was learning soldering in electronics at CodeMash, they were like, okay, now you can like build a proximity sensor that does an alarm when somebody comes by. You could use it you could use this for like some computer thing. And I was like, if you think I have learned this for any reason other than to make costumes light up, you are sorely mistaken. That is what I will be doing. You have taught me how to make the light light up, and that is exactly what I want.
Kate Holterhoff (38:30)
Mm.
Yep. Yep.
Yep. Yep. Yep. man, that is that is funny. So I know you’re you’re very goal oriented, with your with your projects, right? It’s like what is the best tool to achieve this end? yeah. And
Abbey Perini (38:50)
Somewhat.
But I also like I was talking to someone and they hadn’t considered it like you were talking about your friends while the TV is on will be knitting or crocheting. And so I see it as like a fidget because I’m very hyperactive. So like, you know, if I’m on a doctor’s waiting room, that’s like torture for me. But if I’m working on something and then I’m just working on something, and it took me a long time, but I finally did let go of any expectations that I would finish it. Unless it’s like I’m giving this to a person for Christmas, there is a reason for there to be a deadline. So like very, very
long-term projects. I worked on this one cabled shawl for literally years. that I’m able to let go of and that transferred into when I first when my first professional developer job, I was having a really hard time with the fact that software is never finished. It’s never perfect. It’s never like you’re always going to working on something and iterating on something. And I was like I need I need the dopamine. I need the check mark I need we’ve done this. It’s done.
Kate Holterhoff (39:40)
Hm. Right.
Abbey Perini (39:51)
And then you’re coming back to me and being like, well, I mean, yeah, it’s done, but we could also improve upon it like infinitely. And so those two concepts kind of melded together and I was finally able to accept that. And that’s something. Naranda, another mutual friend of ours, recently, this year, was coming to me and being like, They’re just and we have to and I was like, it’s never gonna be done. It’s never gonna be perfect. I need you to internalize that.
Kate Holterhoff (40:19)
That is such a good point. You know, I often have talked about as a front-end engineer at a digital marketing agency. I I never had the issue of like burnout that I talked to a lot of other developers about. And I believe it was the dopamine of everything that I built went live. It would it showed up online. Yes, we would redo it all the time, but there was never that moment of like, no, the product manager decided to just scrap it. Or like.
Abbey Perini (40:38)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kate Holterhoff (40:46)
It just went away. You know, these folks are working on a project for a year and then it’s just, you know, n nothing. And so I I felt like feel like the ephemerality of these projects. It’s like you do you want something that exists in the world at the end of the day. And and I I love that idea of like it can still scratch that itch of like the tinkerer and the builder, but it will be a thing. It will exist and you know, I I I I feel like we can’t put a a price on that. So that I don’t know. This this is making a lot of sense to me.
Abbey Perini (41:17)
I agree, I definitely agree. Luckily my first senior I mean not luckily, he had some chatbot that he had been working on for like two years get shelved and it came up again, like while I was there and he was just like
chatbot that will never see light of day. So like I already knew that that was a possibility before I ever got in that situation myself. But then it turned into you know you hit mid and you’re like what’s what are the best practices? What do I like how do I get better? Like at it and then you start seeing everything as an opportunity to refactor and that got me stuck in a mire for a while and like and then and then I had to wholesale rewrite an app and I was like maybe I don’t want to refactor ever again in my life
Kate Holterhoff (41:50)
Abbey Perini (42:00)
I’m done refactoring, I swear.
Kate Holterhoff (42:01)
This is terrible.
Yeah. Yeah.
I know the ephemerality of code is such an interesting thing. And I I I feel like it just like touches on this, I don’t know, the core of a lot of the I guess the personalities of of the developers that I’ve spent time with. Because in a way, it’s like the whole goal. Like obviously we want to be able to keep working on a thing and make sure that it can can keep
evolving, right? And as we have new information and all all this. But at the same time, there is something primal about having our work be meaningful and and and in a way having a physical thing is meaning. Like that gives you that meaning. so I don’t know. I I I I I feel like that’s something I’m I’m still trying to work through myself. and I have heard folks talk about AI that way of like, well
You know what, you wanna refactor this to a different version of Java, just throw it in Claude and it’s done and nobody’s sad anymore. Like you didn’t just waste six months of your life.
Abbey Perini (43:00)
A great
I d I have a friend who is very wise, and one of the things he said to me one day was just like Yeah, everything we work on is in computer. And when you close computer, it goes away. And so I’ve I posted that at some point and people take that very drastically different ways. Like the way that we were talking about it was like, you know, not that that means that it has no meaning and we shouldn’t pay attention to it or anything, but like when you get really bogged down and like all my life identity and my meaning is all coming from this thing that’s in computer, maybe it’s time to close the computer and go Touch grass. Get some vitamin D. Yeah. Yeah. And all of the Exactly. Yeah, no, and I’ve seen plenty of
Kate Holterhoff (43:44)
Touch grass. It’s time. It’s time. Or knit something. Maybe knit a scarf. Take a day.
Abbey Perini (43:54)
talks from men who are suddenly like, I had a life crisis and I realized my family exists. Or like, I’m a cancer survivor and like, yeah, you really learn when you have a major health issue that like time with loved ones is like the thing, the bread and butter of life. So like not to say that anything we’re doing inside computer has no meaning, but like if it’s the only thing that is giving your life meaning, there’s a whole world outside of computer. So
Kate Holterhoff (44:22)
man, that’s heavy. okay. Let me ask you it’s it’s so important, Abbey. I mean, this you’re you’re right. And I I think that’s why I wanted you to come on here and talk about the fiber arts thing because I I feel like it does touch on this this core part of our identities, that you you found a way to access and and that is so meaningful to
Abbey Perini (44:24)
We’re talking about everything in the fucking
Kate Holterhoff (44:49)
A lot of people that I know. So I I don’t know. I just you I thank you for for shining a light on it, bringing more people into the fold of something that, you know, they might find cathartic. and you know, and and the history of course is really meaningful. My god, and it’s got the social justice thing too. I mean, Jesus, we could have spent the whole time talking about that. Working class, women.
Abbey Perini (44:58)
Enjoy it.
Was I know.
I got a whole nother blog for that. We’ll do that another time. This is why you should hang out with us at conferences. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kate Holterhoff (45:13)
I like it.
It’s true. It’s true. Abbey speaks only truth.
okay. Well let me go ahead and wrap it up there. Abbey, for folks who want to follow your musings on fiber arts and other things in the tech industry, where do you direct those individuals?
Abbey Perini (45:32)
if you want my portfolio, that’s abbeyperini.dev. If you want my writing, that’s abbeyperini.com. If you want to buy stickers, that’s abbeyperini.shop. and then my handle is @abbeyperini on everything that I’m on, which I think is Bluesky in LinkedIn right now. Yeah. Yeah. You can find me.
Kate Holterhoff (45:47)
Yeah. Very cool. All right. Well again, my name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at RedMonk. My guest today has been Abbey Perini. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the monk cast on your podcast platform of choice. If you’re watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.
