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Comment by properpenguin | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this adds more value than the other places on the web. A blog, tutorial video, stackoverflow post, book, etc will provide more knowledge in less time than watching someone real-time code and step through the software writing process. I understand the game channels on twitch provide entertainment, but don't see how this will catch on widely. Would love to hear others thoughts.

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Watching someone code teaches many subtle techniques that people don't even realize they do. Especially the holistic set of techniques an individual uses and how they interact.

Also, probably more smart people (not saying the smartest, but maybe even that) don't spend time distilling their ideas publicly as they are so focused on taking on challenging things.

What do you think? Also, personally I kind of like the human element. I agree that written form or edited video's probably make a better reference. But that can also be extracted later from a set of freestyle videos.

Interaction. There is something different / powerful about being able to ask, express, and share knowledge with the person streaming. Something far more innate. You can see this in how the successful streamers all have microphones and cameras. Blogs and tutorials have more accuracy, but live streams have more humanity.

Having said that, I think most will fail to gain an audience. Because, being good at streaming is not the same as being good at programming. Take a look at the popular streamers and you will see how they mimic classic presentation techniques. Improving your skills as a programmer and improving your skills as a streamer/presenter can be mutually exclusive.

It might be interesting to see the thought process, mistakes and debugging.

What you said.

I teach software engineering using an "athletic" pedagogy which means (in part) that I publish YouTube videos showing how I complete small (i.e. 10-30 minute problems) in an efficient manner. Students then try to complete the problems as fast as I do. Once a week, in class, they are assigned a new problem that they must complete correctly within a short time period or else receive no credit.

This provides a mixture of learning by watching a more experienced practitioner do the work, along with active engagement.

For example, here is the website for the software engineering class I am teaching this semester:

http://philipmjohnson.github.io/ics613s15/

The athletic modules ("WODs") start with the coding module. Here's an example of the pedagogy:

http://philipmjohnson.github.io/ics613s15/morea/coding/exper...

Philip

Other people in this comment thread made good point about value for viewers, so I'm not going to focus on streamers in my response.

> blog, tutorial video, stackoverflow post, book, etc

Well, how does one records a tutorial video? It is not that easy, there are a lot of details: language, library, length of video, format(i.e. what things to explain, in what order, etc, etc). Streaming is straightforward, you code as you normally would and explain stuff as you go. As for information density, I think it is possible to speed up "boring" parts(e.g. silent thinking) in recorded videos. We aren't 100% sure, but we're coding a prototype.

When I've watched these things, I've tried to see if I could figure out whatever bug the streamer was trying to fix before they could (difficult without the ability to actually look through the code on one's own), and alert them if so. It's like a game, but you might actually help someone out.

I like watching it to get a better idea of people's workflows (and through that hopefully improve mine).

There's also seeing what people really do rather than what they say they do. It's easy to say you follow various principles, always test, yada yada, but I suspect most people's real world behavior is different to their ideals.

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