Instead, I want to share the lessons I have learned for anyone else who would like to try live coding in this way for themselves. I have so much more to say about the benefits that streaming on Twitch has brought me, but that’s for another blog post probably. I can honestly say that my open source work has been changed for the better, thanks to the generosity and encouragement of my Twitch community. I have logged off a stream many a time, only to find in my inbox that someone has sent a pull request for some work that I had mentioned I didn’t have the time to start on. One of the funniest moments I have had was when one of the fam pointed out that my Arduino board was not working with my software because the microchip was missing from the board: I am truly touched by the kindness and wit of everyone joining me each weekend. We have a lot of fun, and I like to call the live coding parts “massively multiplayer online pair programming”. These days I have more than a thousand followers, and a lovely subset of them are regular visitors who I call “the noopkat fam”. The tiny number of viewers I got that Saturday were really encouraging though, so I kept at it. I was very nervous, and I had stayed up late rehearsing everything I was going to do the night before. I believe I worked on Avrgirl-Arduino, which I still frequently work on while streaming. I gave it a go myself a week or so later, after setting up my Twitch channel and bumbling my way through using OBS. You can even see this comment I left under his video:
His open source life is very different to mine. I found it fascinating, as Nolan maintains open source libraries that get a lot of use and activity. Replying to issues on GitHub, triaging bugs, debugging code in branches, you name it. He explained everything he was doing along the way. I watched him streaming his open source work one weekend, and it was awesome. What tipped me over the edge of wishing I could do it to actually doing it is credited to Nolan Lawson, a friend of mine. Handmade Hero was one of the first programmers I watched code online, quickly followed by the developers at Vlambeer who developed Nuclear Throne live on Twitch.
Given that I was already in a niche on Twitch, why not be in an even smaller niche, like JavaScript powered hardware ) I signed up for my own channel, and have been streaming regularly since. I work on NodeJS hardware libraries a fair bit (most of them my own). Instead of gaming, which the majority of streamers on Twitch do, I wanted to stream the open source work I do in my personal time. I gave streaming a go for the first time last July. By Suz Hinton Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch
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