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A live streaming platform dedicated to code

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Re: A live streaming platform dedicated to code

#31
I wonder how coding in front of a live audience frequently would change how you write code. I can imagine both positive and negative effects. I think you would probably get very good at getting boilerplate code out of the way, but I assume it would make you more prone to mistakes, at least in front of a live audience.

Re: A live streaming platform dedicated to code

#33

I love it, I've been considering how to livestream real coding best for quite a while, in terms of personal streaming. Having a dedicated site is great. I'm seeing some skepticism over all for a variety of reasons, certainly valid concerns, but I think they largely frame it in terms of traditional "attention grabbing" streaming, like game play. The other day Notch was streaming his doom-on-the-web experimenting, whic…

> To me, with a timeline, livestreaming and archiving is the ultimate in source control. What if you could trace a line of code to a check in to a time stamp to the video of that line of code being created? What if you could stitch that all together to a work item or ticket, and get video of the design and thinking process, to understanding why the code is a certain way? That's exciting. Isn't that the exact use case…

Commits don't even come close to capturing the amount of data a screen recording does.

Re: A live streaming platform dedicated to code

#34

I love it, I've been considering how to livestream real coding best for quite a while, in terms of personal streaming. Having a dedicated site is great. I'm seeing some skepticism over all for a variety of reasons, certainly valid concerns, but I think they largely frame it in terms of traditional "attention grabbing" streaming, like game play. The other day Notch was streaming his doom-on-the-web experimenting, whic…

> To me, with a timeline, livestreaming and archiving is the ultimate in source control. What if you could trace a line of code to a check in to a time stamp to the video of that line of code being created? What if you could stitch that all together to a work item or ticket, and get video of the design and thinking process, to understanding why the code is a certain way? That's exciting. Isn't that the exact use case…

Quite, but this would be moment by moment, not "huge chunk after an hours work", a proper stream of the flow of time, and very high fidelity. Isn't source control just a fancy way of saving plain text files? In a certain sense sure, but it's also a lot better. I think it would be interesting to explore.

I think the big difference for me is treating a timeline as a first class programming artifact, giving you locality on the code, and being able to explore. What lead up to this code? How long did it take to create? What dead ends were explored on the way? etc.

Re: A live streaming platform dedicated to code

#36
I'll be very interested to see how this goes.

In a former life, I worked on developer tools and as part of that we did some extensive on-site filming of experienced developers, in order to do some new product development (I think we used 10 years of professional development as the minimum bar). I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was over 75% of the time was spent reading code - just navigating, stepping through a debugger (without making any changes), and just staring at huge piles of code.

Re: A live streaming platform dedicated to code

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, with a timeline, livestreaming and archiving is the ultimate in source control. What if you could trace a line of code to a check in to a time stamp to the video of that line of code being created? What if you could stitch that all together to a work item or ticket, and get video of the design and thinking process, to understanding why the code is a certain way? That's exciting. Isn't that the exact use case…

Commits don't even come close to capturing the amount of data a screen recording does.

Therein lies the problem.

Screen recordings aren't a concise representation of the programmer's thought processes, and it would take any viewer more time and effort to watch 15 minutes of video for a problem context and resolution than a concise 1-2 line comment summary of the code delta.

Re: A live streaming platform dedicated to code

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commits don't even come close to capturing the amount of data a screen recording does.

Therein lies the problem. Screen recordings aren't a concise representation of the programmer's thought processes, and it would take any viewer more time and effort to watch 15 minutes of video for a problem context and resolution than a concise 1-2 line comment summary of the code delta.

Certainly! The compression is handy when you have it. This is why check-in comments like "Fixed bug #1234" are really frustrating. The link to the bug is nice, but out of a list of 10 similar comments, I need to find the one that say, turned on the security. I need the compression.

That said, sometimes my goal isn't "find it quick", it's "understand it fully". Perhaps we'll figure out ways to understand the video in fast forward, make visualization of code change timelines, that sort of thing.

But I think it's interesting to start with all the raw data and figure it out from there.

Re: A live streaming platform dedicated to code

#39
post #31

I wonder how coding in front of a live audience frequently would change how you write code. I can imagine both positive and negative effects. I think you would probably get very good at getting boilerplate code out of the way, but I assume it would make you more prone to mistakes, at least in front of a live audience.

I can imagine you'd feel a little more under the microscope so may be either prone to errors or may be so wary of errors you'll be overly cautious. Either way I think that'd be something which would perhaps disappear once you'd been streaming for a while and realised no one was really judging you.

Re: A live streaming platform dedicated to code

#40

I love it, I've been considering how to livestream real coding best for quite a while, in terms of personal streaming. Having a dedicated site is great. I'm seeing some skepticism over all for a variety of reasons, certainly valid concerns, but I think they largely frame it in terms of traditional "attention grabbing" streaming, like game play. The other day Notch was streaming his doom-on-the-web experimenting, whic…

Appreciate the insight and feedback. There's been some really great discussion in this submission about the pros and cons of live streaming code but this is a real deep dive into what the future could hold and it's great to see people have the same positive attitude I have.
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