For the past 10 years, I’ve created live-coded music and audio-reactive visual art under the name Messica Arson. This talk will cover my tools, my creative process for sound and visuals, and how I’ve built reliable artistic systems.

For this talk, I’ll focus on points of failure, lessons learned, and practical solutions, ranging from troubleshooting scripts to touring checklists for venues with varying constraints and internet access concerns.

Whether you’ve coded on stage or deployed to production at 2 a.m., this talk shows how to design systems that withstand pressure and unpredictability.

Jessica Garson is a Developer Relations leader with 15 years of experience, having held senior roles at Elastic and Twitter. She is active in the Python, JavaScript, developer tooling, and creative coding communities, and has spoken globally at conferences including PyCon, Write the Docs, and PyOhio.

Based in New York City, Jessica has been part of the creative coding scene since 2017 and runs RAID, an art and technology meetup. Under the name Messica Arson, she creates noise music and visual art using modular synthesizers and live coding.