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January 27, 2021

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

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