With each performance practice, there are certain stereotypical poses that have photographers grabbing for their cameras. It’s difficult to photograph someone using a laptop, which is why so many photographs of laptop performances show them tweaking an EQ knob on a mixer during an idle moment. Live coders are often too busy to even do that…
Thank goodness then for the codeface, such as the above photo of me with Adrian Ward taken by Renate Weiser at the first ever live coding workshop in Hamburg 2004, the very meeting where TOPLAP was first born. The real activity in laptop performances happens in the laptop, so it makes some poetic (and photogenic) sense for the laptop screen to be projected back on to the face of the live coder. In truth these codefaces are likely an accident of projector and stage placement, but the results are often rather nice.
We started collecting codefaces on the wiki a couple of years ago, but there must have been more since then. If you’ve got one, please head over, click ‘edit’ and add a link to it!
