Around last December Mickey had the idea of starting a bookclub. Not just your everyday bookclub, a creative coding bookclub. Their plan was to follow Daniel Shiffman's The Nature of Code and share the progress along the way. Dea, who co-hosts the Creative Coding Craft Space in Hackney, promoted the idea through her meetup, I volunteered, and she put me in touch with them to make it happen.
Hosting an event in London was quite far from my plans back in 2024. I'm generally not a fan of public speaking. And the prospect of being responsible for organizing an event felt a bit overwhelming at the time. But Daniel's book is a bit special for me, it was the catalyst that got me into learning JavaScript during COVID, and that made me fall in love with programming at a point in my career when I didn't find much meaning or joy in what I was doing.
I thought this project would be a good way of giving back, of going full-circle with the book. And doing it with Mickey, who already had experience organizing events, made things way less intimidating.
So I went for it. We started brainstorming a few ideas online during the Christmas holidays and I made a provisional logo that we used as the poster of our first event.
We met for the first time on the 27th of January. It was a tiny and cosy gathering of just about 8 people at The Glitch, near Waterloo. There were some physical copies of "The Nature of Code" circling around while we had a few drinks together. We discussed the Intro of the book and our rough plan for the event. Mickey and I shared that we were in the process of finding a more permanent space and trying to agree on a date to meet regularly. We wanted a place that ideally could fit a small to medium group for free, as we didn't want to be forced to charge for attendance.
Luckily, one person there that day was Bea, co-founder of Peckham Digital, and thanks to her from our second meetup onwards we could host the bookclub at the Borough Road Gallery, part of London South Bank University, on the last Thursday of each month.
Around 20 people attended to discuss the chapter on Randomness in February. I was sadly not one of them, as the date coincided with a road trip to southern Iceland we had been planning for a while. So my contribution of the month was sending Mickey some pictures of waterfalls. We caught up on a call afterwards and they told me how the community was growing and the possibilities that emerged from having such a nice venue. Having a projector and some speakers definitely comes in handy when sharing things!
To make things even, I hosted the third meetup 'on my own' - while Mickey enjoyed some good winter weather in Italy. Bea was also at LSBU that day and she showed me around the space and helped me get everything set up in the room before people started to join in. Ajith, Marysia, Jonathan and Giovanni shared some sketches, we discussed the chapter on Vectors, and a few of us headed to the Duke of York afterwards to keep talking.
Everything was moving almost effortlessly both in person and online. Even Daniel Shiffman joined the Discord channel we were using and showed his support to the initiative!
I rented a domain name and put together a static website to share the sketches we do along the way. Some people started uploading their work through pull requests to the repository.
The group was also getting bigger, which to me was exciting and scary in equal parts, as bigger numbers bring bigger challenges. But we were quite lucky and the people attending created more diversity and enriched the mix.
This is one of my favourite things about the coding community, unlike other fields which attract a more homogeneous crowd, people get into programming from a wide range of backgrounds. Mickey was previously a chef, I come from a film-making and game development background, some people are designers, some architects, some work in education, some are artists, some are developers... everyone has a different set of skills and interests that contribute to making the process of sharing things all the more eclectic and interesting.
Fabio volunteered to make the poster for April, and we met to discuss the chapter on Forces, this time with both Mickey and myself around. I was quite inspired after attending Lu's and Daniel's London Live Coding meetup a few days before and discovering Strudel, Hydra and Flok - so I suggested we tried a bit of 'live coding' for the first time, and someone mentioned Ted Davis' P5 Live. Luckily Bogdan was around that day and took the lead making a cube scale and rotate in a bouquet of bright shades until the browser window crashed, while some of us tweaked small bits of code at a quarter of the rate that his keyboard was chirping spells.
In May, Laura made a beautiful poster and Marysia dared to be the first attendee to 'adopt a chapter', taking the theme of Oscillation from the screen to the speakers using the p5 sound library. Ajith also shared a beautiful interactive visualization of a pendulum, and Luke created an arena group to share resources related to the book.
This June, Jonathan volunteered to present the chapter on Particles, and shared a few examples of how they use Flitter to model the movement of different creatures through particles and distance constraints. It was also a nice recap of some of the concepts from the previous chapters and foreshadowed a few topics from the next one.
And this brings us to today - I can't believe it has already been six months since we started the bookclub. A lot has been happening, and the shape of the event is constantly shifting as if it were a living creature itself.
Mickey texted me one day to tell me that there were some snapshots of the website in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine - which made me a bit happy. They also texted me another day to let me know they had to take a bit of a backseat as they were struggling to find time to organize the event - which made me a bit sad, even if I totally understood their reasons.
The biggest challenge of running a bookclub is perhaps ironically to have a consistent amount of people that are actually reading the thing every month. It takes more commitment than it seems. We have always promoted the event as something open for anyone, whether they have started with the book or not. And we want to keep it this way. But this also means we have to accept that a big percentage of the crowd will just come to have fun, to take part in the coding scene in London without necessarily being familiar with P5JS or the book.
The challenge here is to make the meeting interesting enough for the curious drop-ins while keeping the original essence of a 'bookclub' for the regulars who are trying their best to follow along. This becomes harder the deeper you are into a given book, as more knowledge is assumed. But it is still in my opinion a challenge worth pursuing, as a lot of the value that the event provides is in the interactions between people, and keeping the event accessible is essential for good interactions to emerge.
Anyway. This is all! If you made it this far, I hope you enjoyed reading this. I'm currently rewiring many things in the website to enable more strange things to happen. We will also take a small break from the book during the summer, as people will be traveling and consistency will be even harder to achieve. But we might keep meeting in a more informal manner to code together and brainstorm what is best for the future of the event.
So if you have attended any of our events, or if you are in London and happen to be interested in creative coding.
GET . IN . TOUCH!