Highlights from NDC London 2020

If you read my previous post you will know that I won two tickets to NDC London 2020.

In this post I would like to talk about my highlights from the event.

Dylan Beattie - The Art of Code.

This was the last talk I went to on the Friday and was really really special. Dylan is the creator of the Rockstar programming language and in this talk he went through some examples where code has been used to create art and where the code itself is art. From his first adventures with Logo on his first AMSTRAD computer in 1985 to flutter being used to create incredible artwork now.

Some things that really stood out were:

• The Uroboros Quine which is a Ruby program that creates a Rust program, which creates a Scala program and so on, through 128 languages and back to the start. This is pretty amazing.
• Coding FizzBuzz in Sonic Pi
• Writing Fizzbuzz in Rockstar
• Performing Fizzbuzz live, using the melody generated in Sonic Pi and the lyrics generated in Rockstar.

Laura Silvanavičiūtė - How to Code Music?

This impressive talk went through some frameworks/tools which can be used to make music using code.

Starting with Gibber - a live-coding environment to create music using Javascript.

Then looking at Tone. JS a javascript framework for interacting with the Web Audio API. This included a demo of her app written in Angular.

Finally, a deep dive into Sonic Pi with some amazing examples…

I particularly liked that as she was demonstrating features she was actually playing recognisable pieces of music like Für Elise and Another One Bites the Dust.

Jeppe Tornfeldt Sørensen - An Introduction to Machine Learning using LEGO

Fascinating talk on how he learned about ML using LEGO Mindstorms, he build a remote controlled car, which he trained to follow a line of black tape around his kitchen… by the end (after some trial and error) the car was able to follow any track using the camera of an attached mobile device to “see” the track to follow.