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Comment by shortj | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of caveats, good live coding demos seem share some of the same properties:

- the presentation is focused on the experience around writing the code. Debugging, tooling, etc. No, I don't want to see you fumble around coding. Yes, I do want to see you interact with your tools and libraries and help me learn something in the process.

- the presentation is polished and the presenter knows every single line by heart (and have complete files they can just cp into to place if needed).

- concepts of what we are going to see are established in the presentation before they are demo'd.

- as always, having the video backup won't hurt in case of network or other dependency failures. If your demo is busted and you can't recover in 30 seconds, bail. Your audience gets it and will thank you.

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I feel like the best way to do a live coding demo is to compromise on either the live or the coding part. For example, by preparing the code ahead of time, or playing a prerecorded video of instead. This convinces me that live coding is an inherently flawed concept.

The only live coding I have seen that was interesting was Notch working on a new game a few years ago. It was interesting because "debugging" was looking at what was rendered in the game and changing it. The experience for him was as visual as it was for us instead of inside his head.

You wouldn't happen to have a link, would you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhN35bGvM8c

Start around the 8 min mark

I can't speak from experience because I've never watched a live coding before but I've never understood how it could work. I feel like a lot of what I do while I code would be boring to watch even if you program yourself.

I could see if it was set up as a lesson with everything already worked out and you're going through a recent section of a program you're working on. But thinking of someone watching me while I figure out data structures write and rewrite a few lines of code, go back change something else, stop and think for a bit, write a bit more, go back and change something, sit for a while and think, maybe consult some api documentation. Then having to watch while I try and compile...over and over...fixing every stupid mistake, correcting every misspelled function or keyword, searching for that one miscapitalized letter or finding every misplaced comma or bracket...and that's just the stuff before it actually compiles.

Then you find out everything you wrote is just totally not what it should have been. Or there's that one weird bug that shows up sometimes that takes 4x times as long to figure out as it took to originally to write.

I just feel like these things would be really boring for someone to watch me do unless I've got the whole concept totally wrong.

Either that or it worries me I do something horribly wrong and somehow other people program the way you see in those typical 'computer hacking' programming type things you see in movies.

Thanks for writing this. You're not alone!

Live Coding is like a Cooking Show, and should use the same tricks. Prep everything in advance, and then show it off live, and demo little snippets, but not the whole process with all the long and boring parts.

I don’t mind watching the WWDC sessions by Apple, they do ‘live coding’ but it’s just pasting snippets into place with about 0% chance of it not working.

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