Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

Re:Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch by ioddly on Friday July 07, 2017 @05:30PM (#14722281)

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.

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Re:Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch by avitzurel on Friday July 07, 2017 @05:39PM (#14722347)

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

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Re:Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch by StavrosK on Friday July 07, 2017 @06:39PM (#14722769)

Huh, that's very good advice. I would never have thought about slowing myself down, but now that you mentioned it, it makes perfect sense.

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Re:Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch by will_pseudonym on Friday July 07, 2017 @07:35PM (#14723092)

Just act like you're sitting next to a new coworker, teaching them what you're doing.

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Re:Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch by avitzurel on Friday July 07, 2017 @07:53PM (#14723203)

Act like you're voice controlling your fingers

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Re:Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch by mdmnk on Friday July 07, 2017 @08:01PM (#14723238)

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.

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Re:Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch by grogenaut on Friday July 07, 2017 @10:06PM (#14723665)

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.

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