As stupid as it sounds, I actually have a use for this script: When I clearly want to mark that I start installing something or logging and need a "marker" that stands out.
Very likely there is a better way to do this, but doge stands out.. and if someone would be looking over my shoulder at least it would make them laugh or ask about it.
It's pretty easy to use. The problem is usually to create good input for it. I spent roughly an hour in GIMP just tweaking the original doge.png and trying to get good dithering for the colors.
This is worth a few good giggles from my friends so good job! Just a few questions after peeking through the source: how long did it take you? Why is it so much more complicated than it seems on first impression? What was the hardest part?
The initial code work was probably not even an hour from initial idea to actually having random colored strings and a test shibe. Then I spent some time tweaking the image to be better, as already mentioned.
I never felt it looked complicated. The code is not even 300 lines, and at least I feel that the abstraction is all right. I wrote the code to be flexible, and because of that, adding piping to stdout was really simple. What parts of the code do you find complicated?
The hardest part was getting the Python packaging right, haha. It was difficult to get the doge.txt file distributed in the package in a path that would work both when installed to site-packages and that would work whilst developing. I have since started doing more Python packaging for my other projects (I'm on a contribution streak, so I do a lot right now) and it's gotten a lot easier.