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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

I am way to self conscious for that... I dive deep into a problem for 10 hours and I try a bunch of stupid stuff along the way or make a bunch of mistakes and now I am broadcasting those to the world; and meanwhile either I am paying attention to the people and not working (I always want to get lost in a complete zone of concentration) or entirely ignoring them (which seems weird)... I will go for long stretches--like an hour--just staring at and reading the same data reports over and over again trying to cross reference all of the information, which would be ridiculously boring... I don't understand how people do these things other than as performance art, workshop instruction, or stunts: that people seem to do it and be productive on their own tasks indicates their brains work very different from mine ;P.

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One thing you might enjoy is recording your screen for yourself, and then replaying it at 10x speed.

I’ve done this before and it allows you to get some of the feeling of “being watched” with none of the privacy or security problems.

Also sometimes it’s neat to see the crazy process of building something, particularly if there is ui or visual design tools involved.

Also, I do think there is a whole additional level of understanding needed to practice or “work out” in front of an audience. There is some flourish to it, even if you are mostly doing your thing, you may have more round corners than you might otherwise.

It is definitely a different experience.

I run a piece of software called TimeSnapper on my machine that takes a snapshot every 10 seconds of the entire desktop area. I have recordings going all the way back to the very beginning of 2006. It is incredibly interesting to watch some of those old recordings to see what I was working on that month.

That looks cool. Too bad there's not a Linux version. I suspect you could code a screenshot every 10 seconds in bash pretty easily anyway.

Drop this into a crontab with your desired frequency:

  DISPLAY=:0 import -window root "$HOME/Pictures/screenshot-$(date '+%Y%m%d%H%M').png"

Requirements

ImageMagick installed

Improvements

You can change the date +FORMAT for a more readable filename. See the date(1) manpage.

Caveats

You may need to change your DISPLAY to match your actual X11 server. You may need to add XAUTHORITY=$HOME/.Xauthority depending on your X11 ACLs. Probably doesn't work with Wayland, but nothing works with Wayland so YMMV.

This sounds amazing, essentially a video diary without the omissions of a real diary.

I'd love to see watch my work sped up like this. At 30fps you could see your entire day in 90 seconds.

https://otakunozoku.com/video/working.flv

A month's worth of work in a couple of minutes. Captured way back in early-ish 2013. Sorry about the .flv, that's what web video kinda was back then if you wanted it to work on multiple browsers.

CJ from Coding Garden does a phenomenal job with his streams. I've watched a few of his past streams on youtube and its refreshing. Its cool to see how he progresses through problems and is so endlessly positive. https://coding.garden/

Daniel Shiffman from Coding Train does something similar, but more focused on P5.js and general interactive toys. https://shiffman.net/

I’d watch this, FWIW. The exploration is where the fun/hate/elation/ and excitement occur. ️

You're not alone! I found your description really relatable. I find that I can only truly understand something when I know all the details, and why things are the way they are. That means in the beginning, when learning something new, I'm overwhelmed and not really confident in my knowledge.

Give it a try Saurik! I thoroughly enjoyed watching https://m.twitch.tv/samg_is_a_ninja/ attempt to make a weird Jailbreak tweak for fun.

He did all the things you mention and it was entertaining as well as informative. I saw 50-150 live viewers.

I think quite a few people would like to see you work on something like a new tweak. Start or post an account with a specified stream time then post it here/reddit and see how many people subscribe.

I literally watch the live coding streams just for the mistakes! Not to make fun of them, but to learn from them and realize that everyone goes through this process!

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