Slashdot Mirror
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.'
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.