The Strange Appeal of Watching Coders Code

A year or two ago, I watched notch stream coding for a weekend game competition, and it was fascinating. It was on the front page of HN for a while. I ended up watching it for a couple of hours while I did some low-cognition tasks. I think the appealing aspects for me were:

  * Seeing someone else's desktop and windowing habits
  * Watching for new keyboard shortcuts
  * Seeing workflows similar to mine in different IDEs and languages
  * Seeing workflows in domains I'm unfamiliar with, like collision detection
  * Finding someone's taste in music

Much of what I learned about programming was absorbing habits and handed-down knowledge from coworkers. Live streaming lets you get that without the necessity of making friends or getting hired somewhere. Sitting at someone's desk and working with them is an experience I have to describe as intimate.

"There's a good half-century of research around high expertise development but some of the most powerful and interesting has been greatly underestimated. The short version: modeling, modeling, modeling. If you want to develop high expertise, spend time, lots of time, observing those with high expertise. If you want to help others develop high, deep expertise, put them in a context where they have as much exposure as possible to expert examples. This could be either examples of the work experts have done or, depending on the domain, observing the experts as they do their work. The problem is, we let beginners (and intermediates) spend way too much time being around mostly other people who are also beginners. In the ideal, perfect, not practical world... everyone would be surrounded only by those who are not just a little better, but with very high expertise.

"The only catch — but this is a tough one for most of us — is that this works far better if the expert does not try to explain what they're doing as they're doing it. In most contexts, the learning is much more robust and accurate and deep if the learner just... watches. Without trying to consciously analyze or ask for justification for every little decision. There’s a time for analyzing the work of those with more expertise, but the counter-intuitive research shows quite strongly that this is more likely to reduce performance, of both the learner and—in many cases—the expert trying to explain how they do what they do!"

Source: http://www.cioinsight.com/it-management/expert-voices/kathy-...

It'd be supremely awesome if companies like LiveCoding could convince experts to live code from time to time. Would certainly pull in lots of visitors. Might even be able to charge for that. Or get experts to record themselves in the flow of work without a live audience, and make a library of such recordings available. Might be a great addition to some EdTech company's offerings.

It should be noted that Livecoding.tv is (YC S15).

Also, the article states there are "legions of coders" flocking to the site but I can't find much evidence of that, if the Twitter account (http://twitter.com/livecodingtv) which tweets all live streams, is anything to go by.

At the least, if I wanted to livestream code, I would do it on YouTube where I can stream 1080p60fps. (I'm also sore about Livecoding.tv's "you must log in to watch videos" shennanigans when they first launched.)

There's an author I know who does "live writes", which are essentially the same as this but for drafts of prose (she does them via shared Google Docs). There's definitely an attraction to watching the story take shape word by word that goes above and beyond just reading the finished product. I can't quite articulate it fully, but as an example, watching her write in real time lets you see which parts are easy and which parts give her trouble, based on how fast she writes and how much she deletes and rewrites things. I could easily imagine the same holds for code. I'm sure I could learn more about both coding and about the coder from watching them write a piece of code than by just reading the finished code.

To many people, there is a strange appeal in watching almost any monotonous activity being performed by others. I don't know why.

My 3-year-old daughter likes to watch endless YouTube videos of surprise eggs being opened. Live coding is not too different in spirit.

Went to check it out, all content is in flash. This is 2015, flash is no longer acceptable, especially on sites where the target audience is tech people. Hey at least they have TLS

If this sort of thing interests you (or even if you think it is totally ridiculous) you should definitely check out Handmade Hero[1], which is a livestream of a game's development. My own programming skills have improved from watching Handmade Hero as I've picked up some new techniques (and shed some bad habits as well).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/handmadeheroarchive

"Back in the day" as a hobbyist, after staring at the crt someone exclaimed "well do something!" I was quite amused. I recall a story where the idle bill gates had to tell (mom?) " i'm thinking". The best is Feynman recount of debugging a radio circuit where the awed owner tells someone "he fixes radios by thinking about them!"

Is this a paid advertisement or an organic article? Is there any way to tell with such things, in general?

I am wary of reading a "submarine" and not knowing it: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

There's nothing wrong with paid content, if that's what it is, but there ought to be a way to distinguish paid from organic content. One thing I do like about traditional journalism is the attempt to separate "journalism" and "opinion", and the attempt to maintain high integrity in the former.

With everything moving online and into arbitrary structures, it's difficult to know what I'm reading. I don't want to suspect that everything I read is secretly a paid advertisement or involves some kind of kickback, but an article that's biased so strongly in favor of its subject and presents no alternative views, not even for the appearance of some degree of impartiality, reads like an article that was written around a predetermined conclusion. Which again is OK, but I want to know what type of content the page I'm reading alleges itself to be.

Wish they supported HTML5, I've heard bad things about Flash

Shameless plug, but definitely on topic... I recently got hooked into "watch me code" kind of thing. It triggered the same braincells that are activated when I am coding. Thinking what's next, shortcuts, etc... A sort of powerful "loud thinking". I decided to give it a try to sit on the other side of the desk, and this is my weekend project http://willcodefor.pizza

The pricetag has multiple reasons, gauging real interest and seeing if maybe, eventually... it would make sense economically to move to tutoring full time (thing that I would enjoy).

I think this is missing the point: Watching people do a niche activity will only find a niche audience. However, the appeal may be exponentially increased by bringing in the human factor and antagonism. Good lessons could be learned from poker coverage on ESPN, once thought to be a ridiculous idea (who really knows that much poker, who really cares about people sitting around, etc.), now it's a huge hit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_on_television)

How about watching designers? I'd like watch some great mobile or web designers working through their process.

I can just see it... Twitch, but for coding. Bring on a tech celebrity for some color, and have a regular commentator and just mock the programmer for their "poor java style".

I think the point is that if you just browse a code base to learn you lose much of the timing information. Even if you examine the commits you can't really predict how much time it took to make a certain change and most though process is probably lost. Also it's common to squash smaller commits before push so it makes one, but consistent commit.

I don't argue if there is any value in this, but there is certainly plus information following the thought process of a programmer. The parts that takes longer to write emphasize harder and more thought out modifications for example.

>Unlike Twitch, Livecoding automatically archives every stream, which means that it’s quickly accumulating an extensive video library — although, right now, it’s not terribly well organized.

Organize live sessions by commit somehow. I guess only open source developers stream anyway (I couldn't try the site, I don't have Flash) and if they could easily or even somewhat automatized could tag live sessions or parts of live sessions by commit hash it would be really nice. Imagine browsing a codebase in git, looking at some seemingly odd code and thinking "what was the thought process of the guy who wrote this?". Then you make a git blame, then enter the commit hash to search on livecoding, maybe the guy has the session up there and you can get more info.

I think the 'live' part of streaming might introduce a high noise factor.

What if the programmer could finish a programming session and then go back and see exactly what they have done and reflect on it? What if they could highlight just the interesting parts and leave the uninteresting parts on the cutting room floor? What if they could supply a reflective narrative describing how and why the code evolved? I think these types of experiences would provide more valuable learning experiences than the typical live code stream.

This is what I am trying to accomplish with my project called Storyteller:

http://www.storytellersoftware.com

There is a longer video demo here:

https://vimeo.com/97711978

(Earlier in the life of the project I also emphasized the tool as a version control tool/replacement but I am backing away from that for the time being)

I think people like watching game programmers. I'm writing a compiler at the moment and wonder if I could get any audience.

I love watching other people code! As a viewer, you get to see the mistakes people make, their frustrations, and spur-of-the-moment thoughts. They are way more entertaining than video tutorials. The same people that don't like to watch Twitch streams, probably don't like watching others code.

I'm not trying to be snarky, because apparently people are watching, but I'm curious who the audience is?

As a coder I have almost zero interest in watching other people code. I'll read through the end result, but watching somebody type it in? What's the point?

honestly, it has no appeal to me and it blows my mind why anyone would find it fascinating... but what do i know, when twitter came out i thought no one would use it either.

I just did a five hour session the other day. When I do stream, I stream at http://watchpeoplecode.com. I really like the low latency on it. I am able to interact with the audience via text and/or voice chat in nearly realtime with the code I'm writing.

I record my streams and upload them to youtube after. I find it helps me to be productive, meet other people, and share my joy in creating.

Live coding is spectacularly good when teaching. I teach a graduate course in scientific computing and one of the most effective ways that my students learn how to attack a problem, how to debug a program, how to get started when there is a blank screen facing you, is to watch a skilled coder live-code.

https://www.reddit.com/r/watchpeoplecode is a good resource too, and it's got over 10,000 subscribers.

Liveaccounting.tv When?

Weirdly reminiscent of http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

The real educational benefit to this is seeing other people's workflows and how their components could complement your own workflows.

Wow, I could not agree any less in terms of appeal.