I only came in to Handmade Hero after it had been going on for a while, and I followed it from the beginning episodically and made it about to the point where he starts talking about tiles and scrolling, then gave up.

Every now and then I pick up the current version of the code to see what it looks like, but there's no way I'm going to follow it through to the end. But for me, it does work as a reference for the various parts of the code he happens to be working on at the moment, and sometimes he stops to give a tutorial on something like basic 2d physics.

Watching the process overall is useful but if anyone is intimidated by the length of the stream I would suggest approaching it non-linearly.

He seems to have turned off comments on his Youtube stream, which I find disappointing. A lot of the value I've gotten from the early videos came from the comments people made either agreeing with, expanding on or disputing what was discussed.