My Twitch Live Coding Setup

> Coding hasn't lent itself well to "liveness".

> what project is the person working on? - what "feature" are they working on? - what are they trying to achieve at this very moment?

I used to do a bunch of livecoding myself, actually.

I agree with you that most programming does not lend itself too well to livecoding. But there is one niche that I believe lends itself extremely well to live coding.

This niche being whiteboard programming questions/interview practice.

In this niche, the whole point of the exercise is to work on self contained problems that can be solved within 30 minutes, and to talk out loud to your audience the entire time.

Was pretty fun when I was doing it. I was doing it mostly for practice, and now I work at twitch because of it.

And if I ever create my own startup, it will probably be something like "running a recruitment firm on twitch, by getting people to do interviews live".

Edit: Videos of my old stream are here: www.twitch.tv/stale2000/videos

Twitch has in general dropped the ball by not trying to make streams more interactive. I think we should be past the stage where we are using just "dumb" clients.

I see the same difficulties with some games, for instance those that do not lend themselves to a simple score board.

When I join a stream of someone playing a strategy game which also has a tactical layer, you are usually equally clueless as to what is going on. Certainly at the strategic layer but also as to what a good outcome of a tactical encounter is.

I'm not sure how technology can fix this. On the other hand, other spectators can usually pretty easily do this in chat.

What if the real useful functions live coding is fulfilling have to do less with the spectators, but are more on the creators side?

Communicating what you are doing while you are doing it is a extremly practical way to focus your thoughts. That kind of rubber-duck like process works better if you have somebody concrete you can adress (e.g. a youtube audience, or a good friend of yours), because you won’t get yourself get away with cheap excuses that easily.

If you have to talk about a thing it will immidiately become clear which parts of the code you have internalized and which parts you have a harder time wrapping your head around.

I think, displaying your commit history and something like Todoist the entire time would solve most of these problems. Todoist would give the viewer a broad context and future intent and your commit history provides insight into the current status.

If you're live-coding you should be constantly talking aloud what you're doing and what you're thinking about. The most popular Twitch streamers are usually good at filling silence.

Similarly to streaming games - there are several subgenres on a "performance vs entertainment" scale.

There are "no commentary" streams, "some commentary" streams, "backseat gaming/coding" streams where the streamer is asking viewers how to solve a problem and then implementing their suggestions, streams discussing metagame/architecture of the code, tutorials for beginners, and streams where the code/game is just an excuse, and the real focus is on interaction with chat and random topics.

If you're an average codemonkey/noob in a game - few people will want to watch your no commentary stream; if you're John Carmack/starcraft god people will watch you silently doing git merges/practicing split micro over and over for hours :)

Some sidebar that shows info a chat mod or the streamer can set could maybe solve this. Then anyone who is regularly watching and moderating for you can try to keep it updated, and new viewers can just look at the screen.

Alternatively if you're handling it all yourself as the streamer, something like an emacs buffer with org-mode that you try to periodically update and leave on the screen.

Would be quite cool if livecoding sessions were more TDD based, and you had a log of all the tests you'd created in the current session. I realise this might not be a good fit for all sorts of work though.

    > So far, no live coding experience has been able to satisfy this. 

You are right. But some are interesting for the purpose of inspiration, or even entertainment. I've watched @Swizec recently and also the guy who created minecraft, mojang, had some epic livecoding years back.

They're similar to cooking shows on TV or youtube. You might not be able to do the stuff yourself, but just watching someone knock down their immediate obstacles can be inspirational and promotes confidence to emulate their approach for one's own projects. It is also heartening to see that elite pro's struggle with the same little snags that everyone else does.

The context and intent is, of course, important if you want to reproduce the exact same project, but that would be less interesting, I think.

What % kind of hit do you think you take? I think live streaming the development process might be a really cool way to build a community around a developer-focused tool I might build. Imagine if DHH had streamed the process of creating Rails before it was Rails. I think you're totally right that there's tension between being entertaining and being productive, but do you think one could it well enough that ancillary benefits might be worth it?

< (aka. financial dive) year.

what do you mean?

How did your sabatical turn out? Did you get what you expected out of it? I am starting one right now and wonder if you had one or two words of advice? Your comment made me laugh btw, I am in such a similar position! Best to you.

Rubber duck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

As someone who has streamed development, it does help in that regard. However, I feel like it also slows me down a bit, and you have to be extra careful not to expose any sensitive bits.

And then there are the backseat coders who only sit in the channel to tell you how they would code it... they're fun.

I just launched my beta site, Vidcap.co. It was a lot of work and I was thinking all along that it would've been interesting to stream or YouTube the whole 5 month process.

The night of launch was a tough night since I didn't understand at the time how to deploy on Azure.

Unfortunately I didn't record at all. It would've been nice to have something like that, even if no on watched. Even if one person watched, they would see that sometimes the "easy" thing takes a lot of persistence and nail biting to make it happy for some.

I agree, it helps keep you on task because you feel that you owe it to your "fans" to put on a show. Maybe from no on I will stream just for the hell of it.

Do you have a project by the way?

80% is thinking and figuring things out, 20% is writing code; always.

I agree on both fronts, a well written article but to me the notion of people observing any missed key on the keyboard would only increase the likelihood of me messing up tenfold. Props to those who livestream coding, I don't think I could.

I think it's a good educational tool. It's like watching a cooking show and seeing how a chef goes from preparing raw ingredients to a finished product.

Question: Is it necessary to use "they" now that it's clear that she's a girl?

I thought you use "they" when gender is not clear as to avoid assuming it's a guy.

A good reason for live coding is transparency even beyond a GitHub repo: I tried live-streaming data science because everyone thinks it's magic, and I try to show that it isn't. (and also show that data science coding is easier than one may think)

I do some live-coding in my spare time as a way to maximize focus and avoid distractions. It's the exact opposite of a tutorial or something useful for the casual observer - most of the time is me making mistakes and learning from them (a.k.a. fumbling around in the dark, reading docs, and fighting the compiler).

For that reason I also decided to go with Youtube - there's far less casual drop-ins and the people who join tend to be genuinely interested in what they're getting into, even though the traffic is lower (I experimented with Twitch for a couple weeks before going this route). Also it's easier to permanently archive.

Fwiw the topic I'm learning about is Rust + WebGL -> WebAssembly... I typically stream on Sundays but often enough, life takes over and I miss a week (this is part of what's making it really hard for me to learn - there's not enough momentum). Feel free to drop in: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGKhwtFOUlzj4VILDU0efkQ/liv...

That said - I agree 100%, I don't know why anyone does watch, it's probably super boring unless you're in the exact same boat! ;)

I think it is easy to dismiss until you've had a proper go at it

The experience for me was really engaging, and it gives you a kind of energy to keep going.

If you struggle to code outside of work, I think twitch streaming can give you the power to keep going at it without feeling burned out. Without streaming I find it is super easy to switch off and turn on some youtube video or play a game.

If you look at her projects, a lot of it is very MAKER / IOT / ARDUINO focused.

She is pretty awesome and has a significant following helping people with fun projects.

I don't think the stream would work as well if she was a C++ developer at a giant company just streaming her day job.

I've streamed some Wordpress Development I've done, and its surprising the amount of people who hop in and ask questions. Usually because they are wanting to create their own plugin for the first time, or have a specific problem that they are hoping the streamers project will give an insight on.

Anything that touches Dates and Calendars seems to get an audience really fast.

* I can never help these people, and probably shouldn't be streaming.

There's zero reason to run 60FPS for a text editor, turn it down to 15FPS and take that extra bandwidth and put it into quality - if you're worried about the YouTube quality after-the-fact, you can run two encoding jobs though it's a bit rough on your CPU

Agreed.

As someone who makes videos, I'm always jacking up the font size for tutorial videos.

I normally keep my editor's font size at 11px pixels, and it lets me easily fit 3 code windows + optional sidebar at 80 characters, and I can sneak in a terminal in 1 spot on demand without it bothering me too much. Then I have a browser and documentation open on my 2nd monitor. It's a very productive set up running at 2560x1440.

But in "video mode" I have to record a 1920x1080 area of my screen, and on top of that boost the font size of my editor and terminal font size to 40px. It basically means coding with 1 file visible at a massive size. Even splitting my browser and code editor side by side isn't a good idea most of the time when recording videos because it hides too much of the code. Then for documentation, that can't sit on the 2nd monitor because if you're talking about it, it needs to be on the streamed monitor.

It's like coding inside of a coffin instead of a nice 2 bedroom apartment.

It's portable (although it's not a feature I care that much about), but programmatic layers are a huge plus for me. I use Vim and now I don't need to move a hand off my home row to use arrows and I love this. So, it's not really about space. It's also aesthetically more pleasing which is subjective. I'm a bit of a minimalist. I refuse to use multiple monitors such that I don't get used to having the additional screen-space, because I do have a tendency to work at coffeeshops and my workflow remains the same in the office and outside of it.

I like having my mouse closer to my typing position. I've gotten fast enough at the top number keys that I don't mind too much.

> Even if you go full-size it dosen't take that much more space and you save you fingers the extra work for number and function keys.

If I go back to full size, it takes enough space that my shoulder hurts from the off-center kb/mouse, and it makes my fingers work harder and slower to reach the numpad and function keys.

I used to have a full size mechanical, switched to a 60%, and more recently an asymmetrical split 5x6+5x7 keyboard. The two small ones run a fully programmable FOSS firmware (QMK), so I can get keybindings that help me work faster.

The F-keys are used rarely enough that it's fine having them replace the top number row on the 2nd layer. I have a button to toggle to the 2nd layer, and two buttons that activate the second layer when held (one where the Fn key is on laptops, another where Enter is). On the 2nd layer, HJKL are arrow keys, WASD + QE + RF are also arrow keys + home/end + pgup/pgdn. The 2nd layer also has volume+media keys, print screen, and some other stuff on it. So I can navigate around the computer much faster since my hands never ever leave the home row.

The split keyboard is ortholinear (keys arranged in a grid, not staggered). I've had Caps Lock replaced with Escape for a long time and it's way superior to having escape above the tilde. There's no spacebar, all keys use 1 unit on the grid. My left thumb has space and backspace right below it; the right thumb has space and enter below it. So esc+bksp+enter no longer strain the pinkies, and they are faster to use. Aside from that it's pretty much a normal keyboard; however the split does make it a fair bit more ergonomic - both halves can be moved around and tilted.

40% keyboards without the number row on top, on the other hand... I don't know how anyone can use those for real work.

Also, I haven't needed to do it, but you can place on your second layer (or dedicate a key just for it) a key that will take you to the third layer. Put a numpad + mouse keys + F-keys on the 3rd layer and it's perfect for data entry. Or numpad + WASD + arrow keys, so you can play the occasional game which requires both WASD and arrows.

This setup is not for the real world, it is for fame and stream. I can't even imagine not using my 2nd monitor. I have 4 monitors by the way.

With all the distraction and talking, with smiley and responses, I don't think anyone can really deliver anything properly on time. Some people play games, some use different tools for streaming. This is one of those.

Depending on your setup, you might never/rarely need to use certain keys. The numpad is a waste of space, there's literally no need for it. Arrow keys are rarely needed if you use Vim and i3wm (plus vi mode in bash and vi shortcuts for Tmux). On my keyboard if I need the arrow keys I just press Fn+esdf (wasd offset by 1). All the other rarely used keys (F1-F12, PgUp/Dn, &c) are just a Fn key away. I find that combining keys is more convenient that having separate keys far away.

There is a certain maximum number of keys that your fingers can actually reach. At some point, chords end up being easier to type.

I think 3 row keyboards are too few keys, but the number row is actually pretty hard to type, so eliminating it isn't necessarily insane. I have a number row on my keyboard but I also have "raise" and "lower" layers, one of which gives you a number pad on your right hand. I find the numpad easier to reach than 1 and 0 and try to use it all the time. I have symbols mapped to a layer, so the crucial ones are on home row, with the other ones on the letter keys below the number that normally types them, with some exceptions for keys I've moved elsewhere. I also have dedicated keys for := and != which is quite enjoyable. (You can see the complete map at https://github.com/jrockway/qmk_firmware/blob/master/keyboar...)

Basically, if you're programming you are probably typing a lot of symbols. On a traditional qwerty layout, all those symbols are shifted AND on hard-to-reach keys. Moving them anywhere else is an improvement. Having more keys is good for infrequent things like arrow keys, page up/page down, insert/delete... basically OS functions that you use during normal usage of your computer, but that you've programmed any application you actually care about to not use. (In Emacs/Vim you aren't using arrow keys to move around your text, for example. Or at least I don't, preferring C-n/C-p/C-v/M-v/C-f/C-b to the OS keys.)

She did mention this - she said that obs is only recording part of her screen, and she has an area of her screen not recorded for "admin" stuff. She also mentioned she uses keyboard shortcuts for her "secret" scene

At the top of the article it says

> I upgraded from my $30 IKEA table to an Uplift motorised standing desk

There are tools like XSplit which make the process simple. Of course, said tools are Windows only, since the target audience is gamers.

If there's enough of a market for simple code livestreaming, then the multiplatform tooling will follow. (or someone could fork OBS like what Streamlabs did and strip down the features).

it can be but usually people want more power which OBS gives..

It is. GeForce Experience will stream to your predefined YouTube or Twitch channel just by hitting ALT-F9 (or whatever you want it to be), among other programs that do similar.

People choose to use OBS for the extra features. Scenes, layouts/overlays, embedded interactive features, etc etc.

Check out Streamlabs OBS (SLOBS), its interface is much more streamlined than regular OBS, though they still have some difficulty walking the line between flexibility and simplicity.

Because, even for small operations, you want to make it yours. And making it yours involves a lot of creative decisions. The software has to support those creative decisions.

I use vMix to do single-camera personal streams and five-camera, eight-feed, we're-adding-a-drone-soon fighting game tournament productions. But that's because I've already bought into the complexity enough to do it (and the budget; my copy of vMix cost $1300).

I'm not sure I see much of a market for XSplit or Wirecast, but they've got their fans...

It is on steam but it's quite limited.