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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

#71

Post by 49531 »

jzelinskie wrote: post #18

I've streamed myself programming on Twitch, and can echo some additional knowledge in addition to what's shared in the article: Don't expect anyone from Twitch to randomly discover your stream and have any idea what you're doing. Programming anything that isn't a video game on Twitch will be totally unfamiliar to their primary demographics. That said, use Twitter or something else to BRING YOUR OWN AUDIENCE. Be prepa…

Vocalizing your stream of consciousness is very handy any time you are programming in front of others. I have found it to be especially useful during interviews, or while working with mentors/mentees.

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

#72

Post by TimJRobinson »

noopkat wrote: post #40

wow, author here. I didn't post this to Hacker News (I didn't even have an account on here until 30 seconds ago), but thanks for the thoughtful comments everyone! Is it weird if I address some of the questions in here or is that odd etiquette? :)

Thanks for writing the article! It was really helpful for me.

One technical question: How do you make OBS switch to showing your browser when you open it up to look at docs? Do you manually toggle it in OBS or is there a tool available for this?

I was doing JS development using OBS and couldn't find a good way to make the IDE show when it had focus and make the Browser automatically show when it has focus. So I was frequently showing the wrong window to my viewers.

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

#73

Post by Tarq0n »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #72
noopkat wrote: post #40

wow, author here. I didn't post this to Hacker News (I didn't even have an account on here until 30 seconds ago), but thanks for the thoughtful comments everyone! Is it weird if I address some of the questions in here or is that odd etiquette? :)

Thanks for writing the article! It was really helpful for me. One technical question: How do you make OBS switch to showing your browser when you open it up to look at docs? Do you manually toggle it in OBS or is there a tool available for this? I was doing JS development using OBS and couldn't find a good way to make the IDE show when it had focus and make the Browser automatically show when it has focus. So I was f…

You can either use hotkeys for scene switching, or use screen capture instead of window capture. If you regularly forget to switch scenes screen capture is probably the way to go, just keep in mind that viewers will be able to see anything that shows up in the capture area.

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

#74

Post by Tarq0n »

ekimekim wrote: post #5
nightcracker wrote: post #3

If you are programming, especially in a live studio environment, you should really invest into multiple monitors.

The author mentioned several times that they tried a second monitor, and it just wasn't their thing. And that's ok. Everyone has different preferences and something that works great for you (and me - I have a 4-monitor setup right now and loving it) isn't necessarily what works great for everyone.

The author tried a laptop monitor, that's much less ideal than a second monitor bordering perfectly of the first.

Either way it will definitely challenge your multitasking though.

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

#75

Post by tenpies »

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.

If he's verbalizing his thought process it might actually be better than the average comments you get on code. Might actually have to play around with dictating what I'm thinking at key points in the process.

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

#76

Post by mdmnk »

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…

personally I would avoid this unless I could tie it to a specific program (like Unity) -- if it just indiscriminately logs and shows keys you will probably end up revealing a password or some other sensitive info.

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

#77

Post by mdmnk »

tenpies wrote: post #75
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.

If he's verbalizing his thought process it might actually be better than the average comments you get on code. Might actually have to play around with dictating what I'm thinking at key points in the process.

Push-to-talk helps a LOT. When I first started streaming I would just have a running stream of consciousness filled with lots of "uhhhhhh" and swears. Using push to talk helped me become more conscious of when I wanted to speak and since then I've gotten better at self editing and don't have to use push to talk as much.

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

#78

Post by mdmnk »

zeta0134 wrote: post #52
Kiro wrote: post #9

I want to do this but I'm afraid of two things: 1. Show how horrible my code is. 2. Accidentally leaking sensitive stuff.

Concerning 1: My code is regularly horrible. I start any project in pure prototype mode. How quickly can I get what I want on-screen and working, so I can figure out if I actually like it enough to keep going in that direction? Once I'm out of proof of concept mode, I start working on things properly, and inevitably some horrible prototype implementation of something will survive for several months. It's always enter…

> My code is regularly horrible. I start any project in pure prototype mode

This is my preferred method of programming as well -- start with a pile of working crap and refine. order out of chaos!

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

#79

Post by mdmnk »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #72
noopkat wrote: post #40

wow, author here. I didn't post this to Hacker News (I didn't even have an account on here until 30 seconds ago), but thanks for the thoughtful comments everyone! Is it weird if I address some of the questions in here or is that odd etiquette? :)

Thanks for writing the article! It was really helpful for me. One technical question: How do you make OBS switch to showing your browser when you open it up to look at docs? Do you manually toggle it in OBS or is there a tool available for this? I was doing JS development using OBS and couldn't find a good way to make the IDE show when it had focus and make the Browser automatically show when it has focus. So I was f…

> How do you make OBS switch to showing your browser when you open it up to look at docs

I do this by setting up multiple scenes in advance and then using the automatic scene switcher (under the Tools menu).

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

#80

Post by mdmnk »

jzelinskie wrote: post #18

I've streamed myself programming on Twitch, and can echo some additional knowledge in addition to what's shared in the article: Don't expect anyone from Twitch to randomly discover your stream and have any idea what you're doing. Programming anything that isn't a video game on Twitch will be totally unfamiliar to their primary demographics. That said, use Twitter or something else to BRING YOUR OWN AUDIENCE. Be prepa…

> a joint channel of shared programming content and have many different programmers participating

I like that idea a lot -- have been wanting to team up with other devs on live twitch projects. If anyone is interested in getting this set up be sure to PM me -- I have 14 years of dev experience in a plethora of languages:

- Python - C# - Ruby - PHP - Javascript (front and backend) - HTML / CSS

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