Lessons Learned From Starting a Local Live Coding Community
It’s the little moments in life that give you the impression you made a difference that, to me, makes everything worth it. It might be just a tiny itsy little difference, but it’s a difference nonetheless.
If I’m honest, my dream to start the first TOPLAP node in Israel arose out of loneliness and envy. Loneliness because I couldn’t find other live coders around me, and envy because I was envious of the live coding communities in places like NYC, the UK, or Barcelona, where people organized Algoraves and there seemed to be so many talented and passionate visual and audio live coders.
When I discovered live coding in 2016, it took me a few years to dedicate myself entirely to my creative practice. It’s only after my experience of teaching web development to a community of women—and noticing the many downsides of working in the high tech industry—that I decided to return to my occupation of being a full-time musician. But this time, using Sonic Pi as my main performance tool.
I’d never been to an actual Algorave. Barely anyone knew what it was in Isreal, apart from a few digital artists I met who had studied abroad. It’s my craving to find like-minded artists, combined with my desire to participate in an Algorave, that initially fueled my dream of creating a local TOPLAP node in the city of Tel Aviv.
Since then, years have passed and at the moment of writing, there’s now a small group of people interested in live coding meeting every two weeks under the banner of TOPLAP Israel.
Creating this small live coding community in the heart of Tel Aviv has been a journey, and I admit, I made many mistakes along the way, as it can be expected from trying to create something out of nothing with very little experience.
Here are some of the lessons I learned in case they can help someone out who, like me, lives in a place where there isn’t yet a live coding community, and who has the ambition and dream of creating one.
But first, here’s the story of how it all started.
Planting the First Seeds
I took my first steps towards organizing a live coding event in Tel Aviv in 2018.
It all started with a question I tweeted asking if anyone in Israel was interested in live coding or algoraves. I received quite a few unexpected responses: first, from a live coder in the UK saying they’d be willing to travel to perform, then, from a few people who tagged some of their Israeli friends who they thought might be interested. This is how, somehow, I connected with Eldad Tsabary, co-creator of the platform Estuary and professor at Concordia University in Montreal.
Locally, I started talking to friends and poking the interest of people around me. Through a mutual connection, I met Johnny Tal, a programmer and musician who had enough of a rebel spirit to grasp the beauty of live coding as an art form.
In parallel, I started giving my first Sonic Pi workshops. It’s by teaching these workshops that I first met a few people from T.A.M.I. (Tel Aviv Makers Intl.). T.A.M.I. is a space for creative hackers and makers with a diverse range of interests. From the first time I stepped into their community space, I was hooked.
With the place filled with machinery for working with wood and metals, 3D printers, computer parts, gear everywhere, and people working on all kinds of cool creative projects, it seemed to me like paradise on earth. I started weekly live coding jam evenings and slowly got a few more people interested in Sonic Pi and the idea of putting together an algorave.
All and all, everything was going well. Johnny used his connections in the Tel Aviv theatre scene to secure a venue for our event and we planned on having our first algorave in June 2020.
I was over the moon. We had the venue, people were interested, a few live coders were ready to fly to Israel to perform, and we found some Israeli digital artists willing to participate, even if they didn’t have much experience live coding. Through Eldad’s gracious invitation, I joined the SuperContinent networked live coding ensemble and the collective was going to perform in the event as well (with me being present on stage while others joined remotely). And then, of course, I’d be performing a set as Earth to Abigail.
It was going to be epic, I was sure of it. I had money to spend on promotion and I was reaching out to radio hosts to talk about the event. Johnny and I had big dreams and big ambitions. The venue was big enough to hold at least two hundred people. If we managed to have enough people attending, this could be an event we could hold on a regular basis.
We felt we were starting a real community, no, a movement! Everyone would be talking about it and we were ready to take Tel Aviv by storm. We thought of creating an app that people could download to get to know more about the performers in an interactive way. We didn’t have a clear idea of when we’d have the time to do that but it didn’t matter, we’d figure it out.
Personally, I was incredibly excited. Scared also, for sure, the pressure was on… But wow, we were doing it, and I was finally going to participate in my first algorave!
Then, the pandemic happened and all our plans came to a brutal halt.
Reaching a Breakthrough Moment
Still, I didn’t want to give up. After being stranded in Canada for four months because of the pandemic, I returned to Israel in July 2020. Two months later, I was back on the horse. I contributed to organizing an event during that period but had an unfortunate fallout with one of the organizers. I reached out to a few institutions to try and organize a series of live coding workshops online, without success.
I kept hitting closed doors until, thanks to the persistence of a friend who never let me forget that T.A.M.I.’s doors were always opened, I decided to go back there and give another Sonic Pi workshop. We ended up continuing the workshops on a bi-weekly schedule, and after two or three months, we started to have a small core group of people dedicated to attend the meetings and learn.
TOPLAP Israel was finally born.
But by June 2021, the precarity of my situation in Israel sank in. My visa was expiring soon and I had no way of renewing it—this meant I would have to leave the country the next month and relocate somewhere else. I decided to leave for Portugal, where my family lives. The pandemic had taught me the importance of staying close to the people I loved and I had been away from my family for a long time.
During the last week I spent in Israel, we held our first small algorave at T.A.M.I. It’s a small place and not many people attended the event but it didn’t matter. What mattered is that for the first time since I started this adventure, there was a small group of people each taking turns on my laptop to play with Sonic Pi while a small group of people was there enjoying the evening, some staring at the screen with their heads bouncing to the sounds of live coded beats.
I felt like crying, I was so proud of what we had accomplished together.
Flyer for the first algorave held at T.A.M.I. in Tel Aviv
lessons learned Along the Way
Even though I left the country, the group is still meeting on a bi-weekly basis at T.A.M.I. I’m so happy to know that they are continuing to learn and work on their skills beyond the fact of me being there or not. Some of them are stepping up to give live coding workshops of their own, using different languages, or trying new concepts.
If how I described our ambitions pre-pandemic seemed naive, you’re not wrong. Looking back, there are many aspects of building a live coding community and organizing my first events I overlooked.
1. People live coding does not equal a live coding community
This was my first faulty assumption when I started this journey. People can be interested in live coding without necessarily wanting to meet under the umbrella of a live coding community.
Being part of a larger local community of live coders was my dream but most people interested in participating in the first algorave had no intention of contributing to the larger vision of forming TOPLAP Israel.
It takes more than an interest in live coding to form a group, it takes people who are willing to grow alongside other people through time and consistent work. One of the main reasons why we were successful in creating this community at T.A.M.I. is because people there already had a community-oriented mindset.
2. It takes time for beginners to be ready to perform in front of an audience
This might seem obvious to most people but it wasn’t obvious to me. Since I started performing as a musician very young, I didn’t realize how daunting this prospect can be for someone with no experience as a performing artist.
In my mind, I thought I could just give a series of five or six workshops, and BOOM! People would get excited at the idea of performing live. I soon realized this was a completely unrealistic expectation on my part.
Through giving workshops, I realized most people need months of practice before feeling comfortable enough to live code in front of an audience, even if it’s a small one. I learned to respect everyone’s learning pace and developed tools to become a better educator. I learned to encourage them to push their boundaries through positive feedback and I did my best to cultivate a non-judgmental learning environment.
3. Consistency is key
During the last four months of workshops at T.A.M.I., we sometimes had a full house, and sometimes barely anyone showed up. In the end, what mattered is that we were all connected through WhatsApp and Telegram groups, and people were aware that something was happening on a regular basis, no matter what. This is what allowed the group to continue, even after I left the country.
4. Mainstream institutions are not the easiest to approach when you have an untested concept
At first, I thought of contacting more conventional institutions to try and get people interested in live coding.
I approached BPM College, a school providing professional music and sound engineering programs, to try and create a series of live coding workshops for their students. I also talked to a few companies offering education in computer science and web development.
I quickly realized it’s difficult to provide the kind of credibility these institutions need with a concept that hasn’t been proven before. I thought that the existence of the global TOPLAP community would be an argument strong enough to get a foot in the door. But the truth is, I wasn’t able to provide them with proof that people within Israel would be interested in learning about live coding, and because of that my project was perceived as too much of a risk.
5. It’s not just about teaching live coding, it’s also about educating a potential audience
“What’s the point of live coding?”
“Why not just use something like Ableton Live?”
“Why would anyone want to see a show and watch people type on a screen?”
“Sounds like a cool concept, but I’m not into experimental stuff.”
“Seems pretty limited compared to what you can do with a regular DAW.”
These are questions and comments I heard countless times while I was trying to explain to people what live coding is.
I remember a pretty horrible gig I did in a small bar in Tel Aviv, pre-pandemic. I spoke to the owner of the place to book a show and did my best to him what live coding is and what my music sounds like. No matter how hard I tried to articulate that, although I used an unconventional tool, my music wasn’t experimental per se, he still booked me for a show on the same evening as experimental musicians. These performances were great, the problem was that my style of music didn’t fit at all in the lineup and some people in the audience ended up disappointed after hearing me play (and I sank into depression for days).
Through my process of trying to get people interested in live coding, algoraves, and TOPLAP, I realized that it’s not just about teaching a form of live coding itself, it’s also about educating a potential audience.
*******
I’m not exaggerating when I say live coding changed my life. By working with Sonic Pi, I discovered a sense of creative freedom I never knew I could achieve at a moment I was ready to give up being a musician. That’s why I was, and still am, so passionate about introducing people to the joys of live coding.
I’m incredibly inspired by the work of so many people and groups out there—live coders, researchers, educators, community leaders, and even companies who believe in promoting a positive approach to programming and computer science education for the younger generations. There are so many reasons why I believe these things matter.
This story is a constant work in progress. I hope I’ll have the chance to dance to the beeps of some of TOPLAP Israel’s live coders next time I’ll be around in Tel Aviv. And if you’re ever around, now that traveling is becoming possible again, why not pay them a visit? There’s a place for you to give workshops or put together a small performance, with a group of people ready to welcome you with enthusiasm and open arms.
People at T.A.M.I. do an incredible job at keeping the place alive through online and offline workshops, not only on live coding but with all kinds of creative and fun projects. They are operating as a non-profit so it’s a constant effort to find funds for the place to continue its activities.
If you’d like to support T.A.M.I. by making a small donation, you can do so using the PayPal link below.
And now for the shameless plugs.
✨ Listen to my music and follow me on Audius (a Crypto music streaming platform)
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Are you curious to hear how code sounds like?
Programming is not only useful to build applications, it’s also a powerful means of expression. When I started programming, I never thought I would one day merge both my passion for music and my passion for technology together.