Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch

Don't expect anyone from Twitch to randomly discover your stream and have any idea what you're doing. Programming anything that isn't a video game on Twitch will be totally unfamiliar to their primary demographics. That said, use Twitter or something else to BRING YOUR OWN AUDIENCE. Be prepared to stream for a few hours or else you will likely never build up traction in your chat.

As this post says, vocalizing your stream of consciousness is vital; think of it like pair programming with the chat. I try to engage the chat without getting totally nerd sniped and ending up off topic.

I think the best way to really kick the tires on Twitch programming content would be to stream podcasts and/or have a joint channel of shared programming content and have many different programmers participating either via a shared account or Twitch Teams[0].

[0]: https://twitchtips.com/twitch-teams/

Something like this... I would really enjoy. Bookmarking this page so I can have a look at all your streams. I would like to do this myself. It would be interesting to be able to share exactly what it is that I try to get done on a daily basis. It would be useful to show my colleagues and management interests. I don't know how much they would pay attention, but even being able to point back to a video at a specific time to share something would be useful.

Unfortunately, I don't have a solo office, so figuring out a regular location to stream from will be a challenge, but that's neither here nor there. I can do it from home a few times without bothering anyone to figure out all the logistics before I actually try to do anything real.

Some solid tips on here and OBS is a surprisingly good piece of software but it can be a resource hog at times.

The hardest thing about it is to keep the schedule and be emotionally available when the stream comes on. I wrote about it here [1].

What I like the most is working through a project in stages on the stream. People can connect with the project and also contribute to it. Working on one-offs tutorial style did not really work for me.

I stream full stack content. From Node.js to Golang and even Devops. [2]

The screen to not show the desktop when doing secret things is good, however, as mentioned here I would definitely recommend a second screen. It changes the way you work a lot.

[1] https://fullstack.network/announcing-my-most-ambitious-strea...

[2] https://www.twitch.tv/kensodev

It suprisingly works quite well and is more entertaining for the viewers to see what and how bugs get introduced.

As a watcher of such streams, be they game session I wonder how people don't see something and go crazy because they can't actively participate - the author does mention that some people will have contributed pull requests by the end of the session. :)

I mostly stream myself doing algorithms though. Basically I do the Google Style interview questions, and almost run my stream like I am doing an actual interview.

https://www.twitch.tv/stale2000/videos/all

The reality of the livecoding scene is that most "real life" coding is actually pretty boring to watch.

In order to be actually interesting, you have to be talking and explaining what you are doing the entire time. I am glad that other people out there are having success!

1. Show how horrible my code is.

2. Accidentally leaking sensitive stuff.

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.

I'm not a gamer and would have never thought to look on there for tutorials. Their search isn't very good and I've found YouTube is the best place to find out who is using Twitch. There are guys with a thousand followers who don't show up on search! Still a very valuable outlet that I bet most coders don't know about.

It was stressful at first... had to deal with trolls (and also about 80% sure hackers that were trying to get me to root my system live). After I got the hang of it all though it became a lot of fun.

I stream game development which is a hobby of mine (software engineer for the interwebs by day). Being that it is a hobby I am still learning. I've been able to make some internet friends, pick up techniques and learn more about C# thanks to twitch streaming. One day I would absolutely love to transition to full-time independent game development and do it all live on Twitch.

Another thing to note - although I have 14 years of professional experience, I used to get nervous coding in front of people, thanks to streaming on Twitch that went away -- I'm no longer afraid to fail or mistype. My overall confidence has improved. I strongly recommend live coding.

edit: I've also gotten MUCH better at talking through my code because to maintain an audience on twitch you have to talk and explain what you're doing almost the entire time.

It's good advertisement, and it lets people have a look at the results of your streaming. For all we know, your stream could be great, good, bad or not at all. We don't know.

Without that information, it is hard to know what to make of the rest of the blog post.

One issue I have is the balance between high quality broadcasts that don't have the opportunity for frequent audience input - or lower quality broadcasts that are more interactive.