Do you live-stream coding sessions?
Building in public means different things to different folks ...
How do you feel about live-streaming your coding sessions?
If you do, what’s your experience? What tools do you use? Has it helped connect with your audience or build your business in a meaningful way?
I do love the idea... we just need more viewers :D
Yeah, I guess it sounds like streaming your coding sessions probably isn’t a great marketing channel 🙃
I tend to prefer recording and editing out the boring bits where applicable. Streaming seems fun but also less fun to watch if you're trying to learn something in particular (this is just my opinion of course). I do like keeping mistakes and such inside the video so others can tell you're a human though. My channel is primarily Ruby, Rails, and front-end tutorials with a few vlogs in between.
Thanks! This makes sense ... I’m definitely not confident with any video editing tools. Any suggestions on tooling to help record and edit?
For editing I'm a fan of https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/.
It's a little advanced but you only need a few features to go from start to finish. It's also free!
I use quicktime on a mac to record my videos. Many other people like third party tools for it. Keeping it simple works best for me 😊
Sweet! Thanks for the recommendation!
No problem. Good luck with this!
I feel like watching live-streamed coding would be extremely boring. Too many typos, mistakes, pixel shifting, debugging dead ends, build and run cycles etc. It’s just too slow.
I think it would be more enjoyable to talk about what your gonna build, and then after you figure it out maybe show how you did it and talk about what’s next.
Good coding tutorial videos feel
like they’re live streamed, but they are rehearsed, cropped and boring parts are sped up.
On the other hand, live coding could be a form of accountability and might help in that regard. But if your goal is to build an audience, good luck.
I agree. I probably wouldn’t watch my own live stream 😬
But I do like the idea of talking about here’s what I’m doing and then explaining it at the end ... which would cut out the boring parts and still provide some accountability.
I have and enjoyed it. I didn't have any viewers but I just talked about what I was writing as I was writing and found it kinda fun. Like externalizing my inner coding monologue.
Yeah, just doing that can help spot so many logic bugs by trying to explain out loud whats in your monologue.
I've recently started live streaming too new to say it's helped. I think I have had max 3 viewers lol.
I don't have any fancy equipment, just a bit standard Logitech webcam the only thing I did upgrade was the mic.
I tend to record the live attend and out on YouTube.
I'd love to livestream some sessions doing Elixir and Phoenix but it seems like design is the big player for live coding.
Interesting ... like stuff that has a visual component is more popular?
Maybe because it's more relatable? Code really is abstract and design is more immediate. I think for live coding you'd need others that were invested in the code base - almost like a large pairing session. Would be interested to hear how yours goes.