Skip to main content

So I tried live streaming last night...

What fun!

The interesting twist is that I wasn't gaming! I did it for software development!

It's probably not a new concept, but I came about the idea of streaming my coding sessions while talking with my wife about my presentations and community involvement. A really good friend of mine streams his League of Legends sessions and seems to have a lot of fun doing it.  The sensation I got was similar to back in my early internet-faring days as I became aware of the breadth of people online.

My project of choice for this is kind of nice because it plays back into the streaming audience interest. Obviously to stream, you have to run some kind of source on your machine and the biggest game in town is something called OBS Studio. One neat feature of OBS Studio is that it allows you to configure a web-browser based overlay for your stream that simply inlines a web page into your stream.
This has caused a proliferation of web-based stream widget providers all vying for streamers to use them simply by copying and pasting a secret URI that renders a widget to their screen.

The Appeal

I think there are many different dynamics to the draw of watching someone code online.  I also suspect most people take a combination of the benefits and never just one. Either for practical reasons to see someone coding to share in comprehension, for the social elements and oddly - for the sound.

Really in the end it's all about community and live streaming is one I totally underestimated.

Things to Improve

So yeah, I think I'm going to be doing this more often - time permitting.  If it takes off in any magnitude, I'll probably have to cave and at least start streaming my voice.
Another issue is that internet connections where I live are horribly overpriced with upstream rates being a cruel fraction of downstream. So I'm going to have to figure something out on that front as the stream quality for coding has to be good enough for text to be legible.
The last thing would be that I have to make sure I only go as far as I've been able to plan out in my head. Otherwise things slow down a fair bit as I start humming and hawing over architecture. Usually thoughts I have while not at a computer.

Anyway, if after reading this, you're interested in watching me do some live coding, feel free to tune in!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Laravel Project Architecture: The Missing Guide

At my job, we've been doing a lot of learning and development using Taylor Otwell 's Laravel 4 PHP framework.  As we've become more familiar with it, we've had to come up with better ways to structure our projects outside of what the documentation indicates and the default distribution that is provided. If you've been working with Laravel 4 for any amount of time or come with experience from another framework and are just getting started, you've probably noticed that there are a lot of different ways to cut up your projects. Choice is nice, but sometimes it can be paralysing or misleading. Concrete Advice This post is done in such a way that you can just skim the headings, but if you want a detailed explanation in each section, feel free to read in where necessary. While I can't say the entirety of my advice is in practice throughout the community, I can say that we are starting to use it, and to very good effect at my job.  Especially consider...
5 comments
Read more

Building .NET Core Nuget Packages

My last blog post was on building and publishing npm packages, specifically for typescript projects. In my opinion, packages are an important fundamental unit in software development. They sit at the confluence of technical competence and collaboration, and represent something the software community should be proud of. Most of the time, you're going to be creating software packages once you're comfortable with some essential pillars: Coding Project structure Software architecture Building Delivery Community Licensing After I got my npm package up and running, my next task was to do the same thing with my C# libraries. Similar to protoculture, I have made a library called praxis .  This is done by leveraging the services and tooling known in the .NET ecosystem as nuget. In this case, praxis abstracts many of the concepts and functionality I require when producing server projects. It builds on top of ASP.NET Core, so in that sense you can almost think of it as ...
1 comment
Read more

Laravel is Good, Facades Aren't

I've been working on some Laravel 4 based packages lately which inevitably results in me also looking at other packages. I've noticed sometimes that people use facades at times that give me pause. The most troubling being from inside their model classes. A quick google turned up this video which assures people "there's still an instance behind everything, we're fine" .  Everything mentioned in the video is true except that there is a very glaring omission. Scope What usually goes out the door at the start of a long series of mishaps in software design is scope . When the desire to obtain a solution is stronger than the desire to consider the implications of a firm approach, mistakes are sure to follow.  Sacrifices like this are made due to the assumption of a high cost to developing carefully. What really is happening however is a false dilemma , being responded to with a convenience decision . It's very easy to write model code like ...
1 comment
Read more