Last Sunday was the first time that I watched a live coding stream on Twitch. Until recently I didn’t even know that this was a thing. I’ve heard about it on the Hanselminutes podcast recently when Scott Hanselman invited Suz “noopkat” Hinton to talk about her stream: Live Coding on Twitch for a year with Suz Hinton
Noopcat on Twitch comes online every Sunday and she has lots of friends who follow her on Twitch and join her in this 2 hour session. Last Sunday as 160 viewers were watching, she reviewed two pull requests and she showed what is in the latest Adabox.
With the two pull requests, she went through the changes in the code, tested it and extended it with improvements for accessibility. She gave lots of tips for developers and how to consider keyboard users as well. It was really cool to see everyone in the chat helping out and giving suggestions. It felt like a nice community coming together.
Watching the unboxing of the Adabox from Adafruit was fun. Adabox is a quarterly delivered box of hardware goodness containing Adafruit products, collectibles and discounts. This box had a Pi Zero and some other cool geeky stuff.
I’ve also learned about Vim and macros in Vm. Someone in the chat posted also this link to Vim Aventures, which is a good resource for learning Vim.
I watched a previous stream too and it was cool to see how the architecture of Twitch extensions looks like with the Boilerplate which is basically just a Docket container. The extension is an iframe with some html files for the broadcaster and a backend service that sends the data. I learned something new today and that’s always exciting. One of these extensions is when the viewers can request songs on Twitch. It was awesome to see how it works under the hood.
You can type certain commands in the chat:
- !whatamidoing
- !editor
- !project
I really liked this stream and I will definitely watch more streams regularly. It’s a good way to learn some new things and to work together.
Do you watch live coding streams on Twitch? Who’s streams do you recommend?
FitGeekGirl 