Sam Aaron
CEO at Sonic Pi
Sheffield, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSam Aaron is a CEO, researcher and live coder with 18 years of experience building programming environments that treat code as performance. Best known as the creator of Sonic Pi, he designs tools that blend live music, education and rapid-feedback programming to make creative computing accessible to novices and professionals alike. His work spans full-stack open-source development—from GUI and audio features in Sonic Pi to contributions on Quil and Emacs Live—demonstrating a rare combination of systems, UI and domain-specific language design. Sam’s academic roles at Cambridge and Sheffield reflect a research-driven approach to software that draws equally from the arts and computer science. He advocates for “conceptual efficiency” in programming, privileging communication and live experimentation over raw computational optimization. Based in Sheffield, he continues to bridge performance practice and engineering to surface ideas useful to education, industry and creative practice.
18 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computing Science, PhD Computing Science at Newcastle University
English
Stackoverflow
402reputation
8kreached
4answers
0questions
Github Skills (32)
c-language10
preprocessing10
qt10
clojure-cli10
user-interface10
post-processing10
language-processing10
emacs-lisp10
applet10
clojure10
parallel-processing10
front-end-development10
document-processing10
data-processing10
file-processing10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
overtone/emacs-live
May 2012 - Apr 2021
M-x start-hacking
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:721 commits, 29 PRs, 61 pushes in 9 years
Contributions summary:Sam primarily worked on improving the functionality of the Emacs Live environment, adding new features to the Clojure-pack, power-pack and foundation-pack. The contributions focused on providing a better developer experience by integrating tools like clj-refactor and smartparens and by adding new shortcuts and bindings. The user also refined the user interface by updating color themes and introducing pop-up windows.
sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi
Aug 2013 - Jan 2023
Code. Music. Live.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:59 releases, 20 reviews, 6639 commits in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Sam primarily worked on the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Sonic Pi project, specifically implementing new features related to audio and code functionality. They added functionalities such as a new "Clear Output on Run" menu item, the ability to hide the menu bar in full-screen mode, and a tap tempo feature. These contributions involved modifying the Qt GUI's main window, settings widget, and other related widgets, and included adding new menu items and shortcuts to increase usability.
reactsynthesizerartsynthesislivecoding
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