Ask HN: Do you enjoy watching others code (unedited)? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you enjoy watching others code (unedited)?

6 pointsdennybritz10 comments

I've had this idea of making screencast of coding in a "natural" environment, with minimal editing. You'd see me building something, how I fail and debug things, look up stuff on the web, and so on.

I am wondering if other people would enjoy watching something like this, or would rather stick to fully edited high-quality screencasts?

Edit based on comments: Thanks for the responses so far. Just to clarify, it wouldn't be a 5-hour long unedited video with me coding. It would be a focused video (30-60min or so) on a certain topic, with a later voiceover explaining what I'm doing, but no "sophisticated" editing or teaching.

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I would encourage you to consider having a abridged version, in addition to the unedited version. Or at the least, a blog post where the reader can 'scrub' the video to a part of interest (e.g. proverbial 11pm design change/decision). Some of the best (and popular) blog posts out there detail the process of creation, skimming over some of the more tedious parts, to enhance the theme of the process of creating.

To echo the others, if you could annotate your thought process - it would be helpful. I would put an analog clock up (less flashy than digital) to subtly catalog the time of day in the video frames.

If you capture the raw output, you can always speed it up ala Notch building a game.

To go to the next level, consider making a visualization of how you built the app - after you've done it.

[1] http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/18/notch-live-streams-making-...

Thanks, the scrubbing idea is great. I mainly want to get around the tedious process of sophisticated editing. Maybe speeding up the recording at certain parts (while doing a voiceover) is a middle ground.

tldr - entertainment for onlookers will probably be low, but educational content COULD be high (but requires more work on your part of course)

So I think that building is way more interesting for the person who is doing the building. To keep engaged, you would have to essentially mind dump your thought processes as you go, an incessant stream of words which couldn't keep up with how fast you think/try solutions, etc.

At best, it would be a tutorial screencast on workflow, or a "how I develop" piece (which could definitely serve it's uses, possibly if you created some platform for people to share these screencasts, so people got a look at how others worked or though even), and at worst, a really boring chance for people to criticize each other.

I think the entertainment value would be very low, and learning/improvement probability is high, but it's very hard to accomplish either of those things without engagement.

Of course, You could build an entire successful youtube channel if you market yourself as "regular guy builds X" or "regular guy builds a node app" or "regular guy programs an arduino" so that people with little to no knowledge, or those who are starting out, or those who love ridiculously indepth how-to videos to watch. How you would differentiate yourself is probably how much educational stuff you could pack in there (for example: a lot of screencasts have some guy on a macbook using vim breezing through creating a node app, but what about if your audience has just graduated from a raspberry pi they got as a gift? How would they learn how to build/download/install vim? how to use vim? how to even get node installed? etc).

Thanks! It's funny, in fact that's exactly what I was thinking. Building a platform to share these kind of screencast with a low barrier of entry. Of course, the first series of screencast would be me building the platform.

well that does sound pretty good -- Also, I (as well as you, judging from your response), could be completely wrong, and the idea fills some immense niche that no one knew existed, or that didn't exist until you made the thing. That's kind of how the world works sometimes.

Also, you should do a thorough check to see whether it exists yet, before building something like this of course.

I Google & DDG'd "screencasts" and found some thing similar, but not quite this idea (startup-iest ones I saw near the top of the list, older near bottom): http://tekpub.com/ https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/programmers http://screencasts.org/ http://www.screencast.com/ https://peepcode.com/ http://www.screenr.com/

I like to watch people in person and via the Internet also. It is interesting to see other aspects of working, how they write code, debug and so on. Well, this goes for everything I think: the more aspects you try to look through the more experiences you get and you can extract the best ideas that work for you. I would encourage you to do this kind of thing, maybe the later voiceover is not the best idea - the "actual" voices or explanations can be very useful and sometimes funny/entertaining as well.

This guy's videos is amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU8kWMMXrQ8 I'd probably watch them if they where like his.

Only in person.

I like to ask questions, and make suggestions.

I wouldn't want to watch someone code something I have no context of in a language I barely know when I can't actually talk to them.

It could be more of a motivator instead of educational or entertaining. Just seeing others getting things done sort of rubs off on you.

5-hour is too long, i think that's the reason people would like edited ones

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