South London is always Cool London

I took my time to write about this. It was a beautiful experience and I was excited to share my story. However, the day after the festival, I flew to Italy, and later to Spain, to visit family and have a break. It was boiling hot. The sun hits different in the Mediterranean. I keep forgetting it, my body forgets it, while stuck on this island in the ocean. So I took things slowly and it immediately became clear to me how tired I was. I put myself through an intense regimen since I started the bootcamp. And that epiphany guided me into a month-ish of doing nothing while recharging. Which wasn’t really nothing since I had job interviews, tech tests and, well, life. But it was nice and needed nonetheless. Did I have to give you all the reasons why I haven’t written this piece earlier? No. Did I have to write this piece at all in the first place? No. Did I want to do both of those things? Yes. I think I’m holding me accountable to myself mostly. Good to clarify. And now that we’re clear on that, let the story begin.

The discovery

I named this paragraph a month ago, when I originally started writing the post. I can’t truly remember what was the plan, so I will wing it.

It all started when I read this blog post (and this wikiblogarden in general) about the London coding scene. It was so comforting for many different reasons. Being someone who started their professional journey in tech via an online government-funded bootcamp, I had virtually no connections. The few people I vibed with were living too far. The few coaches that were nice went away for sabbaticals or other reasons. I felt like it was just me, LinkedIn and my UC work coach.

Going to tech events can be a pain if you’re alone and a beginner. The free pizza is generally decent, but talks are not always engaging and the networking part can feel too formal and hard to break through. I enjoyed most of them, but feeling uncomfortable was a constant.

When I read the post about the coding scene, which the author highlights being different from the tech scene, I felt a splash of morning fresh water on my face. The groups, events and spaces mentioned there seemed so stimulating I immediately followed all the accounts and was excited by the idea of meeting those kind of people.

Since then, I went to so many events I can’t even remember. QueerJS sponsored by tldraw was great and gave me my new browser landing as well as an inside to some very cool innovative tech. I went to FAC meetups and was welcomed so nicely even though I was not an alumni. They were game-changers in terms of my application process as well as leading me into my first open source contributions. Even though they are not in London, this new wave of energy pushed me to join MadLab`s p5.js online course as well as travelling to Stockport for their two Arduino workshops! And of course I went to dance to an Algorave. All of this, while also being part of some online communities, one of them being the amazing Geeks for Social Change.

And it was in the midst of these events that I found out about Peckham Digital.

The Journey (or part of it at least)

The original plan for this post was to do a breakdown of each day. However, it’s been too long now for me to be able to remember everything in depth, but for sure I can still share the general feeling.

On the Thursday evening, there was a London Creative Coding Meetup, which is something you don’t want to miss in the future. There were talks from the one and only Joana Chicau, V and her Downpour, and finally Playfool talking about their wild, quirky and unique creations. I can’t remember who else took the mic briefly, but overall I met so many cool people.

Friday evening was shorter and less interactive. I went to an Indieweb talk by its founder(?) and then the screening of a series of short films at the end of which I got the coolest tote bag ever made by Propoganda, producer of those shorts. I had to dash straight after to a friend`s party, so I missed the chit chats.

Saturday was long. It started early in the morning with a workshop on the demoscene and how to use TIC-80. It was fun and long, and led me and another couple of attendees to go eat a gorgeous pie and mash straight after. Then, I had a few spare hours I used to go around the exhibition. All of the installations required some degree of interaction, which meant you had to spend some time to experience each of them. Which meant I didn’t experienced all of them also because it was sunny and hot and I wanted to be laying in the park dreaming of the beach. What I remember, though, is trying some of the most engaging uses of LLM I’ve seen so far. Creatively, mentally and even phisically. I will drop the link to the programme in case you want to look into the people behind them. Anyway, after that, we dropped the whatever intelligence in favour of another hands-on workshop. This time, we learnt about useful algorithms to code music using strudel, the JS port of the more famous Tidal Cycles, guided by the most fantastic Heavy Lifting. Some of us also decided to join a later open mic, while the others preferred just being spectators of this iteration of Algorave with HL herself closing the night in a collaboration set with Graham Dunning.

I would love to tell you about Sunday too, but I was too tired after these three days and I had a flight on Monday at dawn so I just gifted my tickets to a friend.

The Afterthought

What I liked about the festival and the past, present and future coding events I (will) attend(ed) is the sheer amount of provoking and stimulating ideas that are constantly thrown around. There are, of course, multiple obvious reasons for why this would happen there and not at most tech events, despite the probably higher concentration of knowledgeable people with years of experience.

Most notably, not everyone works in tech. Or it’s a software developer for what matters. Many people are artists coming from different crafts, most of them just approaching it as yet another tool needed to reach their own personal goals. The key here is the way they look at coding not as a mean to solve business problems. Free from legacy restrictions and unbothered by (fr)agile pipelines, they’re just in for the ride.

This freedom, this lightness, let them approach coding in a way that some tech workers used to do years of being bogged down by superiors and management, because trying new things, being adventurous and having fun doesn’t necessarily comply with business logic. In fact, it just doesn’t. “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”, doesn’t apply to code in general as much as it does to its business-oriented iteration. When making art, the whole point is to break. Break rules, break restrictions, break even your own work. Over and over again. That is the whole point of art in my opinion. Creation through destruction. And, although most of these people will never see the same salary of a Senior Engineer (most, not all), and they won’t probably reach the same level of experience, they can make for a more engaging and stimulating bunch, especially when you close them all in the same room with free food and art grants.

This is not a dig to tech networking events. I still like and attend them, to the point I also attend the ones about languages I’m interested to, but haven’t learnt yet. What this is it’s me reasoning my way through where to channel my energy after working hours. I have way too many things I want to do, however, I want to dedicate some of that time to non-work related coding. And, despite there being so many “productive” open source tools I use and would love to contribute to, I decided to stick with the creative ones. I want to code creatively as well as contributing to those libraries that help me doing so.

Here we go. Fundamentally, the reason why I kpet coming back to this post is that I needed to write down a stream of consciousness. I needed to write this whole post to finalise that conversation between me, myself and I. And you joined for free! Thank you for keeping me company though. I truly appreciate it.

But now you’re curious, aren’t you?

I know you are. And you’re also lucky. Peckham Digital is running a one day event on the 26th October. Go grab a ticket for one (or all) of the workshops. Or come to the free Algorave night at the very least.

I give you permission to write me a complain if you’ll regret it. We all love writing those anyway. At least, I know I do.