size 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.

A long livestream of George Hotz live-coding a toy SLAM implementation, twitchslam, over two days in May 2018. It is an unedited session of Python programming with computer vision and visualization.

Footage of Notch (Markus Persson) live-coding his Minicraft game in Java during a Ludum Dare 48-hour game jam. It shows a working game developer building a complete small game from scratch.

A Y Combinator video on vibe coding, the term Andrej Karpathy coined for letting LLMs write code. It reports what YC founders say about debugging, models and how much of their code is AI-written.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

A long live-coded DJ set in which Sam Aaron creates all the music in real time by writing code in his Sonic Pi system. It demonstrates algorithmic electronic music performance.

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.

Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.

Brian Peiris demonstrates RiftSketch, a web app where you write JavaScript with Three.js while wearing an Oculus Rift and watch the world around you change live. It runs on Firefox builds with WebVR.

John Carmack live-codes a simple VR application at Oculus Connect 2 using a Racket-based environment for rapid development and deployment on Gear VR.

Sam Aaron live codes an ambient electronic set using Sonic Pi, the music programming environment he created. The performance shows code driving music in real time.

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.

Two Google engineers perform a mock coding interview and then discuss best practices for candidates, including asking clarifying questions and communicating while solving.

Jon Gjengset spends about three hours livecoding complex changes in a Rust codebase with agentic AI tools, testing his hypothesis that AI is weak at non-pattern work. He documents where Claude Code helps and where it struggles.

The first part of a ShaderToy live-coding series that lays the groundwork for The Drive Home, a rainy night-traffic shader. It covers basic setup and builds toward rain and bokeh effects.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

Debris by Farbrausch, the winner of the Breakpoint 2007 demo competition. All of its 3D visuals, textures and music come from a single 177 KB executable.

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.

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.

Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker, the winning PC 4k intro at Revision 2012. It is a realtime demo with music and fractal visuals in 4096 bytes.

Inigo Quilez live-codes the "Happy Jumping" animated scene in a Shadertoy GLSL shader over about six hours. He builds the raymarched character step by step, explaining the math and procedural techniques, with checkpoints linked for each stage.

A short side-by-side demo of a large image loading over a slow connection in JPEG, progressive mozjpeg, JPEG XL and AVIF. It shows how each codec renders partial data.

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.

Steve Yegge shows Efrit, a tool that gives Claude full control of Emacs, on the Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene show. Claude opens info pages, runs shells and even draws a Mandelbrot fractal in a buffer.

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.

Elevated by Rgba and TBC, the winner of the 4k intro compo at Breakpoint 2009. It is a realtime procedurally generated 3D flythrough with music, all in a 4096-byte executable.

A Commodore 64 demo by Linus Akesson that fits video and music into 256 bytes, winning the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017. A technical write-up accompanies it.

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.

A recording of .the .product by Farbrausch, the first-place 64k intro at The Party 2000. It fits an 11-minute 3D demo with music into 64 kilobytes.

Memories is a 256-byte MS-DOS demo that packs eight effects and MIDI soundscapes into a tiny program. It won first place at Revision 2020.

Khalil Estell's CppCon 2024 talk argues C++ exceptions can reduce binary size in firmware. He digs into how exceptions work and how to shrink their code footprint on embedded platforms.

A roughly hour-long live hacking session in which Go team members Andrew Gerrand and Brad Fitzpatrick write the new version of tip.golang.org, the site serving leading-edge Go documentation. It is unedited pair programming on a real Go project.

CGP Grey explains the elegant ratio of A4 and the metric paper sizes, then zooms out across scales from the Planck length to the observable universe.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

A one-minute capture of Tim Clarke's 1993 'Mars' DOS demo, a roughly 5 KB program that renders a navigable terrain landscape in real time.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.

A timelapse of Notch (Markus Persson) making Metagun, a game built from scratch in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 18. It shows the whole coding session sped up.

A 256-byte MS-DOS intro that renders a raymarched, procedural 3D animation. It won the 256-byte competition at Riverwash 2009 and the scene.org award for best technical achievement that year, and the author published commented x86 assembly source.

A short unscripted demo of writing FizzBuzz in JavaScript with a generator function on a steno keyboard, typos included. It gives a feel for what real coding in stenography looks like.

A short look at the Voder, the first electronic voice synthesizer, demonstrated by Bell Labs at the 1939 World's Fair. It was operated by trained women using ten finger keys, foot pedals and a knee lever.