live coding

Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, gives a demo-heavy GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on live coding music. He covers the history of Sonic Pi, how it evolved, and what it can do for education and professional musicians.

Andrew Sorensen's OSCON 2014 keynote in which he live-codes generative music on stage using his Impromptu environment while narrating his computational and musical choices. It imagines concert programmers as a performing art.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

A HOPE XI talk on programming by voice with open source speech recognition. The speaker writes Linux systems code by voice and describes building custom voice grammars as an alternative to the keyboard for programmers with repetitive strain injuries.

Dylan Beattie's NDC London talk on code written for art, fun and curiosity rather than utility. It includes quines, live music programming with Sonic Pi, and a memorable closing.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf EU 2019 keynote introducing Phoenix LiveView, which builds interactive server-rendered apps without writing JavaScript. It explains how only changed dynamic parts are sent over a websocket.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf EU 2023 keynote tracing LiveView's evolution from simple form validation to full apps, with code examples and live demos of what 1.0 will offer.

Mirabai Knight's PyCon 2013 talk on Plover, a free cross-platform stenography engine that lets people write at up to 240 WPM on ordinary hardware, including a demo of coding by steno.

Sasa Juric explains how to parse a language from first principles without regexes, live-coding a simple parser combinator library in Elixir. It was given at WebCamp Zagreb 2019.

Zach Oakes explains why Clojure suits making games at runtime, so designers can experience their work as they build it. He combines abstract discussion with live demonstrations, drawing on his play-clj library and Nightmod tool.

Emily Shea explains how repetitive strain injury pushed her to program by voice using speech recognition (Talon), and gives a live coding demo. She argues voice-driven development can be pain-free, efficient and enjoyable.

Mario Zechner explains why he built pi, a minimal coding agent, out of frustration with existing agent harnesses. He also discusses how AI agents are straining open source projects and argues for slowing down.

Aditya Siram argues that functional programming has much to learn from Smalltalk's interactivity, using Pharo and Squeak to show live, visual, explorable programming environments.

Tavis Rudd describes how RSI forced him to program by voice, and shows the Python and Emacs Lisp system he built with voice recognition. A live demo creates and deploys a small system without touching the keyboard.

Chris Ford builds up from a single sine wave through layered abstractions to a Bach canon, using Clojure and the Overtone audio environment. The talk shows music theory as a natural fit for functional programming.

A two-hour live stream in which Aaron Hsu explains the architecture, design history and aesthetic of Co-dfns, his parallel APL compiler. He walks through the code and the reasoning behind its dense style.

Jim Weirich's RubyConf 2012 talk derives the Y combinator step by step, live-coding in Ruby lambdas. It builds up an understanding of functional programming and lambda calculus from first principles.

Dan Abramov live-codes hot reloading with time-travel debugging at React Europe 2015, debuting Redux and its devtools. The slides themselves are driven by application state.

Jack Rusher's Strange Loop 2022 talk argues that most programming languages are still designed around punchcard-era assumptions. He makes the case for live, interactive programming environments, drawing on Lisp, Smalltalk and REPL-driven development.

Titus Winters' CppCon 2017 talk argues for C++ and Google's Abseil to be maintained as a live at head language, relying on testing and automated tooling rather than never changing or promising no compatibility. It covers Hyrum's law and the limits of semantic versioning.

Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf 2018 keynote introduces Phoenix LiveView, which renders HTML on the server and updates the page over websockets. It includes a demo showing that latency is not the bottleneck one might expect.

David Nolen explains how ClojureScript is used at Vouch.io to build mobile and web software with a single language and REPL-driven workflow. The talk includes a live coding demo of React Native development.

Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.

Rik Arends presents Makepad, a Rust UI framework, at RustNL 2023. The talk covers designing modern, GPU-fast UIs with Rust and includes live-coded demos of an IDE and a synthesizer.

Emily Shea, a Fastly engineer with repetitive strain injury, describes using voice dictation as her main way of programming. She covers homophones, custom vocabulary and building her own voice commands to write Perl.

Yegor Denisov-Blanch of Stanford presents a study of nearly 100,000 developers at hundreds of companies, measuring how AI affects productivity from commit data. It finds an average boost of about 20% with wide variance by codebase, task complexity and stack.

Liz Rice live-codes a minimal container runtime in a few lines of Go at GOTO Amsterdam 2018. She explains namespaces, control groups and what a host knows about its containers.

Noel Rappin's MountainWest RubyConf talk introduces Smalltalk to Ruby programmers. He compares the two languages' object models, blocks, 1-based arrays, simple syntax and live programming environment, and walks through sample code.

Dan Abramov's JSConf Iceland talk on what came after React 16, with live-coded prototypes of async rendering and time slicing. It previews the ideas that became concurrent mode and suspense.

Bret Victor's talk "Inventing on Principle" argues that creators should find a guiding principle to fight for. He shows demos of immediate-feedback tools, such as live-updating code and animation editors.

Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant shows how fMRI brain mapping can be used to decode what a person sees, with visualizations of brain activity and its implications.

Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School laying out software 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, with LLMs seen as utilities, fabs and operating systems. It covers LLM quirks, partial-autonomy apps and keeping a human in the generate-and-verify loop.

Rick Hartley's AltiumLive keynote on differential pairs in PC boards. He argues the rules from cables and twisted pairs do not carry over, and covers which pair geometry gives the best impedance control, the right spacing, routing practice and how much skew is acceptable.

James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.

Jared Mauch tells how he got fed up with poor internet options in rural Michigan and built his own fiber network to his town. The talk was given at NLNOG Live in September 2020.

A CppCon 2018 talk arguing that OOP has failed to deliver on reuse and performance, and presenting data-oriented design for C++ with practical worked examples from real systems.

A CppCon 2014 talk from Microsoft engineers on using portable single-source C++ to deliver Office across iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. It covers architectures, techniques and lessons from real cross-platform projects.

A CppCon 2014 talk by Microsoft engineers on how Office delivers a single-source C++ codebase across iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. It covers architectures, techniques and lessons from shipping cross-platform products.