Where Crochet Meets Code: Fiber Arts and the History of Computing with Abbey Perini – RedMonk
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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.
Links
LinkedIn: Abbey Perini
Abbeyperini.dev
Abbeyperini.com
Bluesky: @abbeyperini.dev
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...