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Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

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Re: Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

#41

Post by noopkat »

burger_moon wrote: post #33
avitzurel wrote: post #4

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…

How did people find you to start following your streams? I've wanted to start doing something like this for a while but not sure how discovery works and I feel like I'd be wasting my time. I'm interested in doing programming and some other things.

I post a stream reminder to twitter the day before, and just before my stream starts. This has been pretty effective for me. It also helps if you use the #twitch hashtag.

Re: Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

#42

Post by noopkat »

memco wrote: post #38
minimaxir wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a second monitor for live streaming is more useful for things useful to the streamer but which do not need to be shown on screen to readers (e.g. frantic Stack Overflow research when the code breaks, or analytics as the article mentions).

While it may not work for everyone, Casey Muratori (of the Handmade Hero referenced in the article) shows pretty much his whole desktop, including the times he is looking up documentation. Granted, he's not searching SO, but actual API documentation for Windows OpenGL or CPU instructions, he goes through his whole thought process including the time and effort it takes to understand and interpret documentation. Then a…

I think showing your process is really important and helpful to those watching your stream. I always show what I'm looking up in my browser. Folks at home are really great at helping me read it, as I'm often talking while trying to skim the docs quickly - not a good combination!

Re: Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

#44

Post by mb_72 »

Very interesting, however as comfortable as I am after 20+ years with some degree of coding in front of others (pair programming, fixing something with the boss breathing down my neck) I couldn't imagine doing this as strangers watch on; it's, at least for me, sharing a too intimate or personal experience. I also have a long-standing habit of using four-letter comments as attention-grabbing and transitory 'to-do' markers, which would likely be in breach of any kind of streaming service's TOS.

Re: Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

#45

Post by bleair »

Nice writeup. I think the people who are good at twitch streaming are charismatic and/or funny. Being entertaining is awesome, but isn't necessarily the same as being good at reasoning through problems or engineering good software.

As a watcher of such streams, be they game session I wonder how people don't see something and go crazy because they can't actively participate - the author does mention that some people will have contributed pull requests by the end of the session. :)

Re: Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

#46

Post by grogenaut »

mdmnk wrote: post #32
avitzurel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

yeah this is completely true -- you have to talk and sometimes just drop coding completely in order to explain concepts etc. to your audience. I think this is a great skill that can be applied at your IRL job as well -- have gained a lot of confidence since i've started streaming.

Correct... A major part of streams is the community you build, not the content. Some people get away with just pure content on twitch but usually they're either really great artists and the process is just beautiful to watch or they're pro gamers who people watch to pick up top strats even if they're not engaging otherwise.

My views are not that of my employer.

Re: Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

#48

Post by rctay89 »

I wonder if you could include all keystrokes like Ctrl-x in the screencast, maybe even a timeline of the keystrokes; I imagined it to be "running" along the screen like in Guitar hero. Nevertheless this is a great effort in distributing latent/implicit knowledge, which I think coding to be heavy on; for example, how would a terminal user know that Ctrl-R is reverse-search? (don't get me started on finding out about going back to a previous match...) I remember how I found out about Tab by accident... While being ignorant of these epistemes are not barriers, they do slow down/kills joy.

Re: Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

#49

Post by stale2002 »

Hey! I do this too on twitch.

I mostly stream myself doing algorithms though. Basically I do the Google Style interview questions, and almost run my stream like I am doing an actual interview.

https://www.twitch.tv/stale2000/videos/all

The reality of the livecoding scene is that most "real life" coding is actually pretty boring to watch.

In order to be actually interesting, you have to be talking and explaining what you are doing the entire time. I am glad that other people out there are having success!

Re: Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

#50

Post by stale2002 »

manbearpigg wrote: post #43

liveedu.tv (formerly LiveCoding) has a coding audience orders of magnitude larger than that on Twitch at this moment.

I don't think this is really true.

Right now there are 300 live viewers watching people in twitch Game Dev.

And going to the website of liveedu.... well it is aweful hard to find a list of live streams ordered by number of currently active viewers. It almost seems like they are trying to hide the number of active viewers, perhaps because they are so low.

The closest thing that I found to a list of active live streamers shows me that there are 2 streams running right now, with a total of 15 users watch.

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