Others I treasure are: john romero (twitch), george hotz (twitch), and stephen wolfram (twitch, youtube).
The latter also has astonishingly low viewer numbers (typically <20).
What other lesser-known gems are out there?
“Tsoding Daily/Tsoding” on YouTube/Twitch is entertaining and covers a very wide range of topics. I don’t think he’s “classically trained” per se, but he’s knowledgeable and great at solving interesting problems.
I haven’t checked it out yet, but I think Ryan Carniato (the creator of SolidJS) streams live coding on YouTube too.
Tsoding is really entertaining. Not classically trained but very smart and amusing.
Andrew Kelley of Zig -- https://www.twitch.tv/andrewrok
Really enjoy watching both of them work, and they're both so... calm, cool, and collected in their focus on the technology they're working on as opposed to 'content creation.'
He does graphics programming, writing his own game engine from in C++ using OpenGL. The vibe in his streams is really something else, very interesting guy.
(Actually I'd consume more of that kind of content ie unpolished, quick videos. To me, the signal-to-noise is higher on videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovNZU-gzr6A than videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fAtiORLAg, which seem to take 99% of youtube)
You can take a look at the final of the Shader Showdown at Revision last year here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ7KAD0NyGw
There's a TIC-80 'bytejam' every Monday Night (8 or 9pm UK time depending on the week) on https://www.twitch.tv/fieldfxdemo
And you can catch some previous VODs here: https://scenesat.com/videoarchive
He also self admittedly got addicted to painkillers at one point in time, so that doesn't help either.
W
Sometimes I lost my spark with programming. Watching him reminds me to enjoy programming more.
There are a lot of coding streamers/influencers who don't have the breadth and depth he does, nor the high level experience at a top tech company. They either did a year at Meta and became full time streamers, or are purely competitive programmers, but ThePrimeagen hits the sweet spot for me.
I think he's a great example for lots of engineers everywhere, especially those who are just getting into the idustry. He didn't have an easy path either of just getting a FAANG internship and job right out of college, he had to work his way up to where he is now.
1. neovim >>> vscode
2. X > JS (X=Rust, Go, OCaml etc)
I feel he doesn't do justice to his seniority and breadth of knowledge.
He, for sure, knows a ton. Yet chooses to waste streams on noob topics like editor wars, programming language wars etc.
I much prefer Theo-T3 because he finds interesting topics and really explores tech in depth.
I fixed that. Those topics almost certainly perform better because they're automatically controversial.
Im not hating at all but for example https://youtu.be/ZOYp6-k9HhE?feature=shared
Theres nothing insightful there that wasnt just in the comments of hn a few days ago.
I love both editors and for the love of me, I don't know why configuring them is soooo hard and brittle.
ThePrimeagen videos on Vim/Neovim is by far information dense videos. It took me sometime to ignore his style of presentation and just focus on content. However, the value I got out of watching his videos is undeniable. Knowing his background a bit and how he battled addiction gave me some context. (Sorry can't find that video on his channel now)
Continuing on this topic of Vim/Neovim ...
Leeren Chen (https://www.youtube.com/@leeren_) is pure genius on the topic of configuring Vim. I've never seen another person like him on Youtube, who uses Vimscript to configure Vim to make it work like an IDE (almost).
[1] https://youtu.be/JFr28K65-5E [2] https://youtu.be/Gs1VDYnS-Ac
TJ Devries (https://www.youtube.com/@teej_dv) videos on Neovim are awesome too (He's core dev of Neovim). But there's lot of gimmicks in his video and it can put people off. His videos with @BashBunni is very approachable in terms of learning about and configuring Neovim.
And his stupid, nonsensical editor wars.
The more I watched him to more u disliked him and eventually unfollowed.
And his noob topics are boring as well. He's pretty much the average HN user, only more experienced. He believes the hype. Like htmx is hyped so he does htmx.
His streams provide nothing for me in terms of new information that us useful.
https://www.youtube.com/@TenderlovesCoolStuff
Some examples:
Writing a test framework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmi-SWeH4MA Hacking on the Prism compiler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6loKD2LXxbc
Thank you very much - I will definitely watch some of those.