Streaming Coding
Streaming myself coding was strange, terrifying, and fun all at the same time.
Putting Myself on the Truman Show

Coding in front of other people is tense undertaking. It's something that I've spent thousands of hours doing in privacy, comfortable in the certainty that the world will never see the process behind the product.
Unlike the nerve wracking blitz of coding interviews, broadcasting my process to the world is more of a slow burn. I'm allowed to make mistakes and pursue rabbit holes, but each moment carries the uncertainty of whether I'm doing a good job.
What should I do next? ๐ฐ
Maybe they're bored? ๐ฎ
Is this thing ever gonna work? ๐ณ
Am I talking too little? ๐คจ
Am I talking too much? ๐ฑ
Where was I going with this function, anyway? ๐ซจ
There's no right way to do stream, but I want peeps to have a good time and leave feeling like they got what they came for.
Thankfully, my viewers beguile me with feedback that I come off natural on camera. Maybe it's flattery, but I'm thankful for the delusion either way.

Everyone is Watching and No One is Talking
Instead of one person's poignant judgements over voice comms, I feel many people's latent curiosity over text chat.
I'm still solving problems and explaining my process, but it's easier to focus without someone's voice in my head. Discord lobbies are well and good, but I'm so cooked that calls of any kind make me deeply uncomfortable. It's onset is a bounded window announced by an unsettling alarm and a time-sensitive notification. Accepting it requires me to accurately perform the standard meatspace greeting procedures before giving a series of accurate answers in realtime. Toward the end of the call, etiquette dictates that practitioners emit a high pitch frequency signalling when and how the call should end, but I've never been able to pick up on it.
Text chat, on the other hand, is more flexible. Many humans can share their thoughts in parallel, the content of which tends to be more explicit than the spoken word. On stream, it makes for a nice FIFO queue that I can pop off of between coding cycles. Over the course of an hour or so, the "meta brain" for that stream emerges. The "meta brain" is my internal model of my viewer's amalgamated thoughts and emotions. Together, they form a collective consciousness that's greater than the sum of its parts.
Y U Do Dis?
Sharing an activity that I've spent thousands of hours doing in the privacy of my room feels downright strange. It's worth it, though, because I love coding that much. I can blog about it here and chat about it at the office (whatever that is), but I'd be hard-pressed to drag people into my introvert dungeon so we could stare at text on a screen together.
Why Do they Watch?
Lowkey no idea, but I'm not alone.
Why do you think that people like watching you? - Theo
I have no idea! - DougDoug
I assumed that most viewers wanted a tutorial where they could follow along and ask questions. An interactive video in the spirit of the venerable Jon Gjengset's series on "Implementing TCP in Rust."
Wrong again! My enthusiasm garners the most praise. Seeing someone do something that they're passionate about, not the content, is what viewers enjoy most. Some of them are neither coder nor code learners and that got me a bit a first.
How could someone enjoy watchng something that they fundamentally don't understand? ๐ญ
It probably has something in common with subtle pleasure of watching #satisfying
videos of skilled workers performing menial tasks.
"Skilled worker" and "menial task" are kind of a stretch here, but you catch my drift. ๐
If you new to watching streams, it can be hard to imagine this as invigorating.
For one, there's something primally fascinating abou the nowness of it. Ephemerality makes each second precious and Chat feels like they're part of something bigger than themselves.
Still, how do you sit down and watch anything for three hours?
You're not alone in that sentiment.
As someone with a 9-5 job and the intention of working on side projects in my free time, I don't understand how people find the time to watch 3-hour live coding streams from different developers and still make progress on their own projects.
— David C (@davidcafor) October 21, 2024
I feel like I'm not optimizing my day.
Streaming is an afk spectator sport. Most of the time, I expect that Chat isn't there. They're either not paying attention, raiding the fridge, or happily distracted. Nor do I require that my audience sit rapt in front of the screen, hanging on my every word.
Many of them are working. Coding, for the most part, but 3D modeling and other creative pursuits regularly come up. My passion, they say, makes them more productive and keeps them focused on what they're building. It's sort of a distributed coworking session where I serve as tailored background noise. A bit like a reality TV show with celebrity drama, except code's the celebrity am I am the drama. ๐ฅ
Personal Benefits
Personally, the exercise has helped me become more productive when coding off stream. It serves as accountable practice at getting "the thing" working as quickly and simply as possible. Unlike a coding interview or structured learning, however, there's also the chance for polish and documentation as the code grows in maturity. In effect, I feel more confident in my ability to create quick, maintainable solutions.