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Watching People Code Is Becoming an (Even Bigger) Thing
itwbennett writes: Faithful Slashdot readers may recall the story of Adam Wulf, who spent two weeks live-streaming himself writing a mobile app. The phenomenon has quickly become thing, by which we mean a business. Twitch.TV, Watch People Code (which is an offshoot of the subreddit by the same name), Ludum Dare, and, of course, YouTube, are bursting with live or archived streams of lots of people writing lots of code for lots of different things. And just this week, Y Combinator-backed startup Livecoding.TV launched. The site has signed up 40,000 users since its beta went live in February, but unlike the other sites in this space what it doesn't have (and doesn't have plans for) is advertising. As co-founder Jamie Green told ITworld: 'We have some different ideas around monetisation in the pipeline, but for now we are just focussed on building a community around live education.'
I have been coding commercial software since 2000. I worked as a teaching assistant for an introductory programming course in one of the top universities in my country.
I think these videos are awesome. One 2 hour video should be mandatory part of high school IT classes.
Every year, we used to get 2-5 people in our 700-800 people course, who do not belong. They are definately not becoming coders, they are in pain and shouting "IS THIS IT? IS THIS WHAT I HAVE CHOSEN? WHAT IS THIS SH*T?". Then they drop out or go on to pursue other study paths.
If they had seen a video about a coder in action, they would have quickly grasped the work they would end up doing in their careers. Young people seem to think, there is some sort of glamour in writing mobile games that they are blind to the reality of coding.
As a viewer, it's about learning technique and thought processes. Identifying issues, attempting a particular thought process, only those that provide a strong narrative to the work they are doing will be likely "stars". Watching how good programmers (assumption) deal with their environment and the typical problems they face. Seeing how people top down or bottom up write code is very interesting (within limits).
As a broadcasting coder, it takes a fair amount of personal confidence to do it, particular in this field. Having to verbalize what you are thinking and how you are considering the problems in front of you is actually quite challenging. Those that do well in the broadcasting scene will most likely be strong professionally as well.
That said, I personally don't understand the fandom about broadcast games to the level that it has taken. I get the benefits, but I don't get the market.
Are you new to coding? Have you ever wanted to write a program or app, but didn't know where to begin? You can read books about programming, but that only takes you so far. Sometimes, you just want to see how other (successful) people do it.
Every single book I have read about C++ programming tells you how the language works, but suspiciously says something to the effect of "Using your compiler is beyond the scope of this book".
Terrific!
You can learn how to program, but you will never see the rewards of your effort because you don't know what linking/compiling is or what object/executable code is.
I've actually done something similar to this in the workplace before and found it to be very effective. Basically I scheduled a meeting for the last hour or so of the workday Friday and invited the other developers to come jump on with me. I shared my screen, we had an open mic, but basically I talked through what I was doing and they had a chance to see how my thought process works and also to make suggestions or ask questions. It turned out to be a good chance for the more junior folks to learn from me and some of the other experienced developers and at the same time it made us think about what we were doing at a deeper level, which is something you can get complacent in after you've been doing it a while.
This is something I did for several weeks in a row, but the last time was at least two years ago -- and yet as recently as last month I've had some of the folks that participated bring it up and comment how much they learned from it. If you think about it, it's basically pair programming on steroids.
This is exactly what I was thinking, the best way I've found to help jr programmers is a kinda pair programming where I explain things while they watch. When I run into a fork, I talk out loud about which route (and obviously take any input if offered, which rarely is, sometimes I push them to think about a complex question too but the idea is to keep mobility). And then assign them the other half of the day with there own tasks.
:D
With modern languages there are just so many "you should use this over that" and pitfalls that you can run into sometimes having the fish can be more helpful. (I really want to explain why this metaphor works so please bear (pun caught, now intended) with me) You need energy to fish, also you have to learn how to clean and cook the fish which is best done by the experienced individual the first couple of times so you don't die or have the shits from a simple mistake.
Anyways, food for though.
WTF Slashdot, why do I have to login 50 times to post?