strudel-w-friends

Context: Live Coding & Strudel

Live coding is a practice where code is written and modified in real time to generate output (often music or visuals) while it’s running. It’s commonly used in algorithmic music, performances, and creative exploration.

Strudel is a live coding environment for algorithmic music, inspired by TidalCycles, where users write concise code patterns to generate rhythmic and melodic sound in real time. It’s powerful, expressive, and well-suited for improvisation making it a perfect candidate for collaboration.

Inspiration

We were inspired by pair programming and by how music artists collaborate live, building off each other’s ideas in real time. Live coding and creative coding tools are often very individual experiences, even though creativity thrives on collaboration. We wanted to explore what it would look like to make live coding social, playful, and shared.

What it does

strudel-w-friends adds real-time collaboration to Strudel. Currently, two users can join the same live coding session and edit together simultaneously, seeing each other’s changes instantly. This transforms Strudel from a solo environment into a shared creative space for experimentation, learning, and co-creation.

How we built it

We implemented real-time collaboration using WebSockets combined with Yjs, a CRDT-based framework for shared state. We worked with Y.Doc, shared text structures, and awareness to track connected users and synchronize edits across clients.

Rather than building a separate app, we integrated directly into Strudel’s existing codebase, adapting our feature to fit its architecture.

For deployment, we used the Vercel CLI, even though the repository is hosted on Codeberg, which required additional configuration and manual setup.