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Why Some Developers Are Live-Streaming Their Coding Sessions
itwbennett writes Adam Wulf recently spent two weeks live-streaming himself writing every line of code for a new mobile app. He originally started to live-stream as 'a fun way to introduce the code to the community.' But he quickly learned that it helps him to think differently than when he was coding without the camera on. "Usually when I work, so much of my thought process is internal monologue," he said, "but with live streaming I try to narrate my thought process out loud. This has forced me to think through problems a little differently than I otherwise would, which has been really beneficial for me."
nobody cares about what one guy does.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
... making notes as you go along or whiteboarding , how exactly? Plus stopping and reflecting on what you've done or want to do (even including talking to yourself!) is a standard part of development.
But ooooo , someone did it over a video stream so that must mean its a new and exciting method of development that no one in the history of computing has ever considered before!
Not.
Basically, the lasts generations feel like they are special and everyone should be watching them do eveything. Isn't that what social networks do?, Turn everybody into a narcissistic prick?
If you grew up in an age of ubiquitous connectivity, infinite bandwidth, a webcam, and the belief that everyone was special, you'd stream your own sessions too.
You learn a LOT by teaching and that is what he is doing.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
after learning that 'view counter' got stuck at 5 due to buggy refresh and for last 2 months NOBODY was watching his stream...
We need a developer channel where we can watch folks code 24-7. That way when CSPAN becomes too exciting, we can tone it down a little by switching to this new developer channel.
I talk to myself when I code by myself.
Talking about what I'm about to do and the problems and potential consequences, out loud helps me process it and spot potential issues or better directions.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
This is such a great idea. Here is my 2 cents: When I was in high school, university, and then even in the working world, I started to notice a pattern: When I'd get stuck on a problem and I'd then go to get help, the act of describing the problem would lead to this light bulb moment in my head, and then I'd say "Sorry, actually, I think I just figured it out", and I'd impishly go back to my desk feeling badly for having bothered someone. My theory for why this happens so often is that the act of using the language parts of your brain to communicate something have significant affects on your ability to understand something and to gain insight into it. Exactly why this happens in such a powerful way, I'm not quite sure, but the affect seems to be pretty evident. Perhaps it even has to do with the part of your brain that tries to guess how someone will respond to your communication -- I think it's well understood that we have a powerful feature in our brain that tries to predict just prior to us saying something how another person will react, so that we presumably can avoid unwanted outcomes. But what happens when that predictor says "oh, duh, I know what they're going to say", and that happens to be a suggestion that leads to the answer. It almost seems connected to the "I want to avoid being embarrassed" impetus in our brain -- that as I'm explaining the problem, there's this fearful part of my brain that say "oh crap, this is probably something simple and I'm about to be embarrassed by how easy it is for them to correct my mistake", and then it frantically does some quick computations to figure out what silly little insight I missed that is going to lead to embarrassment, and then it comes running to my consciousness in the nick of time and say "WAIT WAIT, I have it!". Simply sitting at your desk stumped by a problem, and perhaps bored, don't elicit that same jolt of mental frenicity.(nice, I just made up a new word -- frenicity) I can definitely imagine that live streaming your coding and having to explicitly defend why you're doing something a certain way, etc, etc, could lead to some really nice benefits. This is also one advantage of working at home like I do... you can "talk to yourself" in various ways -- encourage yourself, defend your ideas to yourself as the judge, etc, and that all involves the explicit linguistic circuitry that normaly lay dormant if your'e sitting in a cube farm being quiet.
No, he is not. And, no, he is not. And he is even using a strange editor for his programming. Furthermore, he is mumbling what he is doing. There is nothing to be learned from for normal people. However, for computer science you could see what he is writing and reverting and you know his thoughts so you have plenty of data to understand how such crude hacker comes up with ideas and how he codifies them. And how fast he forgets about things form last week when he tries to read his own code.
1. I watched a live coding session a month or so ago and lasted about 10 minutes (the first 5 I ignored because the streamer forgot to turn on audio) before I stopped. This is only useful for those who have enough time on their hands to watch someone code for hours at a time and can't find anything more interesting to watch. I just can't imagine sitting through this all the time.
2. For the developer who is streaming: You can get the same benefit (articulating your thoughts out loud) by using your cat, dog, infant or some inanimate object you can talk to (a Wilson volleyball, perhaps). You'll save tremendous amounts of bandwidth, storage space etc. and won't temp someone who should be making better use of their time to watch you so they can pretend they are doing something productive.
When I was a kid, we had a handful broadcast channels and I watched what was on because that was literally it. If I didn't like what was on, I found something else to do. Read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play a game, or go outside.
Then we got cable. More stuff to watch, woohoo. Plus those scrambled premium channels where you might catch a glimpse of a boob. But MTV and HBO were only unscrambled in the family room, and seeing the same video over and over again, or the same movie over and over again got boring. So I'd read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play a game or go outside.
Eventually I grew up and bought a cable subscription of my own. Hundreds of channels. At first, some were really good. Like Discovery. Then "reality TV" showed up, and the combination of cheap to produce + novelty become too irresistible for those cable networks that used to put out decent content and once again I'd read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play a game or go outside.
So then came YouTube. YouTube has some good stuff on it, but honestly a lot of it is poorly made crap that isn't worth watching. So I read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play with my kids, play a game or go outside. I largely skipped Vine, Instagram and the rest of the ocean of other self-promoting content platforms. There are some decent blogs out there, but honestly I see things like Tumblr and the content is generally pretty awful, and I've conceded that I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent. And they're actually really, really nice. They just have more time and energy to sort through the boatloads of content being produced and find the good stuff.
I cut off cable. Best decision, I get shows I'm willing to shell out for or that come off the antenna for free. I still have Internet. And now this "livestreaming" thing comes along, and I can't imagine how much deeper the spiral of "too much crappy content delivered at a rock bottom price of zero" is going to go. I'm betting that we'll see some standouts and people who create compelling content in this new medium, and I can totally get how it's going to be amazing for people who are living in shitbag countries with repressive regimes who try and control thought, but there are going to be plenty of livestreams that quite honestly suck.
I also remember Jennicam ... it was novel for a while, but having a billion Jennicams is no longer novel ... it's going to be clogging up the Internet with the boring everyday drek of life. I don't want to watch that, I live it.
The quantity of profanity spewed would run past most locality's obscenity standards.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
"Usually when I work, so much of my thought process is internal monologue," he said, "but with live streaming I try to narrate my thought process out loud. This has forced me to think through problems a little differently than I otherwise would, which has been really beneficial for me."
Yeah, just wait until you're in an actual office with other developers who try to narrate their thought processes out loud. You'll be wanting to throw chairs through windows in no time.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
It's called Rubber Ducking. The idea is that by talking out loud, you have to form your thoughts into words, which requires you to organize your thoughts more completely. Think about all the times that you've gone to ask someone a question, and as soon as you ask them the question, you figure out the answer yourself. Whether you use a rubber duck, a live video audience, or another person doesn't matter much. This is one of the reasons that pair programming can be quite effective.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Real programmers live-stream with ttyrec, as Lars Wirzenius did a year ago: http://liw.fi/distix/performan...
Most commercial developers (meaning those of us who do it for our jobs, meaning most of us I think) would never do this because of confidentiality and intellectual property rights.
Precisely. Rubber Duck is now video camera.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Can't he just pretend that the camera's on and get the same benefits to his thought process - or does his narcissism require an actual audience?
Back in the 70's, I used to play the "An American Family" game. I'd pretend I was one of the Louds and there was a camera in my kitchen capturing all my ennui as I opened and closed the cabinets looking for a snack. It was great fun.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
It sounds boring. But then, I've been watching some videos of a guy playing Fallout 3 game, including most of the boring bits (sorting inventory and reselling). It's sort of mindless viewing and just when I'm so bored I'm ready to shut it off, he goes and does something stupid. Then my interest perks up. So now I watch it see what the guy is going to screw up again. As in parts of me thinking "it's on the table stupid, it's right there in your view, pick it up already! Aaarrrghg!"
So watching someone live code might be the same thing. "Oh god the bug is right there in plain sight so why is he putting in more printfs to try and find it, if only I could reach his keyboard over the internet it'd be fixed in seconds!"
It gives every narcissistic prick a global megaphone.
Megaphones mean people hear you whether they want to or not (within the vicinity - specified as 'global'). This is more or less exactly 'like' giving him his own global cable channel, amongst who knows how many others? Millions? - no one is forced to watch it. With a megaphone the implication is that you hear it whether you want to or not, and he can't force anyone to watch his streams, so no. not a global megaphone. More of a global telephone number with a party line, except it can only receive calls, not make them...
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.