London Live Coding?

It’s wildly inclusive and aggressively experimental. It’s slightly dangerous but not really. It’s warm and fuzzy and feels like home. Tailor made for creative techie people with ADHD.

Discovery

I’ve always made music and I’ve loved making things with code since I was a child. In 2019 I saw Alex McLean, Antonio Roberts, and others perform at an “Algorave” in the British library (video). By 2025 I’d dabbled in Supercollider, P5, and Chuck but everything finally “clicked” in the summer of 2025 when I stumbled upon a DJ Dave Instagram reel and discovered Strudel. Nothing to compile or install. Just a blank canvas and a rich, expressive language that I could use to make dance music and much more.

Some more googling finally led me to the London Live Coding? meetup. The question mark in the name is essential.

It happened on a Monday night at the Sekforde, an educational trust which happens to run a wonderful pub. It was helmed by the marvelous Lu Wilson and Syntel8 (Daniel). I arrived and went down to the basement feeling rather shy and sat by another newcomer, the amazing nadya via proxy. Nadya is an art student at UCL who had just started live coding. Since that evening, she’s become a major force for awesome in the London scene.

The Sekforde meetup was relaxed, inclusive, welcoming, slightly chaotic, weird and fun. We demoed things we were working on and I think finished with a group improvisation/séance that attempted to use music-technology to contact the dead. It was a truly wonderful “Beetlejuice meets Experiments in Art and Technology” moment and I was hooked.

Algorhythms

Lu & Daniel invited me to perform at the next “Algorythms” at the Carpet Shop in Peckham. A monthly sort of “open-mic” night where people show up, sign up, and plug in their laptops for 15 minute performance slots throughout the evening. The crowd is contagiously enthusiastic and welcoming. They cheer loudly for every performer and even more loudly whenever someone hits a syntax error or the whole laptop crashes.

At my first Algorhythms in September 2025, I played a short set and and vowed to come back every month.

Pastagang

One of the (not) secret, subterranean, seemingly inexhaustible energy sources supporting London Live Coding? is “pastagang” an even more anarchic creative collective that exists online and in your own mind. They’ve released over a dozen albums, manyvideos, blog posts, and various tools for real-time, global, anonymous artistic collaboration such as nudel", ravioli, and reisnudel.

The source code for most of these tools and websites is not only open source but instantly, anonymously hackable. In many cases, anyone can directly commit anything to the main branch at anytime and it will instantly be deployed to production.

By learning about pastagang, you are now a member.

This openness has led to a few ideological schisms and instances of entire codebases being wiped out, recreated, mutilated, mutated, and reborn several times over. But it’s all part of the ethos. Which brings us to…

Mantras

Any strong community or organisation has its own culture, memes, and mantras. They keep members aligned towards common goals and help to nurture positive, beneficial behaviours and mindsets that lead to positive outcomes. Mantras are coded into the tools , casually dropped into conversation, and even incorporated into performances.

Mantras appear and grow and die and transform along with everything else in the community but some have endured. Here are some of my favourites.

• Do it!
• Let code grow
• Let code die
• We love repetition
• We love repetition
• You must create
• You must delete
• Bad code only
• You must make it worse
• Energy: Yes! Quality: No!
• Thanks Yaxu?
• Make it pink
• You must go live
• Normalise sharing scrappy fiddles

The code of conduct

Without a few guardrails the mantra of “Do it” could get us into trouble. The code of conduct allows for confident experimentation without fear of being a jerk. If you’re ever unsure where your behaviour might be taking you, check in with the code of conduct and you’ll know.

Organise, perform, encourage

The mantra of “Do it” also applies to organising events. Have an idea? Make it happen. Need some help? Ask. Asked for help? Do it! This has led me to organise a few casual Sunday hangouts at the Barbican during the dreary winter months. Here’s a list of London Live Coding? related events started by members of the community: (todo: add links)

• Algorhythms
• Algochill
• Algotrance
• Barbican Sunday hangouts
• Sekforde meetups
• Unconferences

These events are all based around people showing up, doing what they can, celebrating what others do, enjoying being together, and going home with great memories and inspiration.

Teaching and learning

The beautiful thing about every community is the way knowledge and learning, ability and need support and complement each other. Whenever I’m at an event, hanging out in the discord, or jamming in one of the tools, I always feel welcome, I always learn something, and I always feel like I can teach somebody a little something.

As my mom once reminded me: to be a great teacher, you don’t need to know more than everyone else, just more than the person you’re teaching and, most importantly, you need to know how to teach them what you know.

There are always more experienced folks, and less experienced folks but everyone is welcome to learn, to teach, and to experiment continuously. And we celebrate when those things happen.

Roles

Read about the many roles & postures in the community.

Ribbons

At some point we realised that a lot of technology-heavy events in London and probably everywhere are also quite tech-bro-heavy. To protect against the risk of tech-bro-ification, the concept of tech-bro-repellent was born The pastagang website was redesigned with a lovely pink background and gratuitous use of heart emojis. The London Live Coding? community began bringing ribbons and safety pins to events and encouraging folks to create lovely bows that they could wear in solidarity with not being a tech-bro.

The future

This month I’m getting to perform with some of my favourite artists. Come along!

Where will the community go? I don’t know. Will it last forever? Definitely not. Am I having a wonderful time and learning a lot about how to participate in a vibrant creative community? For sure.

Come join us!