In my experience plotter art is a fantastic creative outlet for programmers/people with math backgrounds, especially if your day job doesn't produce anything physical in the real world. Shameless self-plug but I recently animated some old plotter pieces which was surprisingly easy since most of my plots were just piles of math that could be parameterized over time without too much hassle: https://chriskw.xyz/art/

Also big shout out to Michael Fogleman who's pieces inspired me to impulse buy an Axidraw at the beginning of quarantine: https://www.michaelfogleman.com/plotter/

Sorry but lifting pen is cheating.