My Twitch Live Coding Experience
Hello!
Tonight, and most nights, I will be streaming myself coding at twitch.tv/healeycodes.
I took the dive into live streaming a little while ago. I try to pick mini-projects that I can complete in one sitting so that people can see how I approach a solution from inspiration to completion.
In the past week, I've built:
- Conway's Game of Life
- a Typeracer clone
- Snake
- a link shortener
- some cryptography ciphers
- a collaborative drawing game
I didn't ship these projects, but I tackled the core functionality and discussed my design choices along the way. People in chat often throw out mini-feature requests (and it's really fun to oblige them).
Learning By Watching
Usually, I don't do any prep. When I was starting out, I found coding streams to be incredible useful because you get to watch how someone approaches documentation, and you get to see their development workflow.
At work, I learn a lot from people when we pair program, and I get to see how they use their development tools and how they tackle big problems and break them down. In this way, coding streams are a good knowledge source for beginners.
When I first started watching tutorials on YouTube, I was shocked that 'proper' programmers wrote the whole project in one go and that it just worked. It would be a while before I realized they had already completed the project beforehand and they were just repeating the steps. There's value in this too but it made me feel like I was not good enough. I wish that I found the 'rawness' of coding streams a lot sooner than I did.
Do I Code Differently On Stream?
I'd say: yes.
I’ve found that I run my code less and describe what I think is happening more. Whenever I run my code, I explain what I expect to happen this time as opposed to before the change I’ve just made. I find that I catch more errors before executing my code.
It also keeps me on task. With people holding me accountable I want to follow through to the goal I set at the start of the stream.
Resources
Just one resource, actually. The only article I read before going live for the first time was by Suz Hinton. In My Twitch Live Coding Setup, Suz breaks down pretty much everything you need to know in depth.
I hope to catch you in chat. Throw me a follow on Twitch and say hey 👋!
Until next time,
Andrew