Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

I have live streamed some stuff before when coding, and I must say most of the people who come into a channel doing coding are really nice people who ask really insightful question, or offer good solutions. It's like Mob Programming with the internet (or as the author here says an "MMOPP"), and it also makes me a better programmer because before I even think about writing any code I'm thinking about how it will be perceived by someone else peering over my shoulder (akin to the pro arguments for TDD).

I started streaming a few months back and I absolutely love it.

Some solid tips on here and OBS is a surprisingly good piece of software but it can be a resource hog at times.

The hardest thing about it is to keep the schedule and be emotionally available when the stream comes on. I wrote about it here [1].

What I like the most is working through a project in stages on the stream. People can connect with the project and also contribute to it. Working on one-offs tutorial style did not really work for me.

I stream full stack content. From Node.js to Golang and even Devops. [2]

The screen to not show the desktop when doing secret things is good, however, as mentioned here I would definitely recommend a second screen. It changes the way you work a lot.

[1] https://fullstack.network/announcing-my-most-ambitious-strea...

[2] https://www.twitch.tv/kensodev

This is an interesting topic to me, as I'm giving a talk with some coding in two weeks and a major concern of mine has been making sure that what I'm doing is interesting and more importantly followable. Normal coding for me just is a flurry of vim activity.

Questions for anyone who does this or views these sorts of streams:

Do you find that people can follow what's happening in vim well enough? I've considered just using plain VSCode because I'm concerned jumping around too much as I do normally might be hard to follow.

Do you feel that this might be good interview practice as well, since the process of explaining code as we write it doesn't come naturally to some of us?

Any additional tips to make sure what I'm doing is comprehensible would be appreciated.

Talk!

Just talk your mouth off, seriously. It's the best tip I can give you to make it interactive.

You gonna open a file and do something, say it, don't just do it. When you are thinking of a problem, ask for suggestions from the crowd/viewers...

Also, ProTip. Vim is a problem if you navigate really quickly along splits (like you should), people lose focus and will just stop following.

I switched to Atom for my last stream (I hate every minute of it) but it slows me down enough so people can follow better.

Hope this helps

1. Stop 2. Just use a part of your screen that is off the recording. Never open `.` files on the stream. Never login on the screen, always off of the screen. If you are showing AWS cli console stuff, make sure you hide the public IPs and public DNS of things.