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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

#61

Post by nine_k »

thinkingemote wrote: post #58

There is a game developer on twitch that uses his VODs (video replays) as a versioning system as he doesn't use anything. "Wait, what and why did I do this? Lemme look at yesterday's vod". It suprisingly works quite well and is more entertaining for the viewers to see what and how bugs get introduced.

This is a nice circus trick. I wonder if it helps productivity, compared to a VCS.

And help it definitely can. For some people, pictures and motions are easier to remember and reason about, even in such a text-heavy area as writing code.

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

#62

Post by markatkinson »

bleair wrote: post #45

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 w…

I suppose that makes the twitch stream an important learning experience for both parties. You can participate in the chat and make suggestions, ask questions. If you are driven mad by someone doing something differently or making a mistake well then it might be healthy to try and overcome that.

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

#64

Post by pbhjpbhj »

stale2002 wrote: post #50
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 streame…

It could have changed within the hour, especially if - as others said - it's a morning routine thing. In that case almost all users/streams could stop across a one hour period.

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

#65

Post by stctgion »

thinkingemote wrote: post #58

There is a game developer on twitch that uses his VODs (video replays) as a versioning system as he doesn't use anything. "Wait, what and why did I do this? Lemme look at yesterday's vod". It suprisingly works quite well and is more entertaining for the viewers to see what and how bugs get introduced.

Sorry are there actually developers who don't use VCSs in 2017?

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

#66

Post by Kubuxu »

rctay89 wrote: post #48

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 g…

This worked for me in the past: https://github.com/wavexx/screenkey

It is basic but works.

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

#67

Post by amasad »

stale2002 wrote: post #49

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…

Ah cool! You're using Repl.it! Would be curious to hear your feedback on how we can make the site more suitable for this use-case.

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

#68

Post by mkl »

pacaro wrote: post #59

It would appear that the author is trying to post as noopkat and has been declared dead (new account?)

New accounts that post a lot right away sometimes get their comments killed automatically, yeah.

You can vouch for a comment to resurrect it by clicking on the "2 hours ago" or whatever (to get to the comment's page), then clicking "vouch". (Vouching requires 30 karma, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326108 .)

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

#69

Post by jasonm23 »

bjterry wrote: post #53
rctay89 wrote: post #48

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 g…

Most people who create Blender (a 3D graphics app) video tutorials use an addon that includes the keys they are typing on the screen. It is very useful, and would be interesting especially for emacs or Vim users who use a lot of bindings.

I made a Twitter account called @emacs_gifs a while back and used a modified version of KeyCastr (on Osx.) to display keystrokes...

Results were quite acceptable.

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

#70

Post by akavel »

rctay89 wrote: post #48

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 g…

I imagine one has to be extra careful to avoid spilling passwords and other secrets then. Probably best when it can be avoided by some technical means like ssh keys for git, etc.
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