My Twitch Live Coding Setup
Lots of people discussing the pros and cons of livecoding. I'd like to share some alternate thoughts if possible. I believe that there is a niche interested in watching and/or participating in livecoding and for them they do it because they can be productive and have a good time.<p>So I took livecoding pretty seriously for a while. I recognise that Noopkat is a pro at this and is one of the most consistent live coders I've seen in a while. I need to pop into one of her streams one day to see how it's evolved.<p>From my past experiences of her stream, my own streaming and others' streaming it feels like there's one big unsolved challenge in livecoding.<p>Coding hasn't lent itself well to "liveness".<p>At least in its current form, sitting down in the middle of a session of someone coding and trying to figure out what they are doing is HARD. It's not like a game where there's a dashboard that carries the score and you can gather all the context you need in under a minute. When joining a stream of live coding, the questions to be answered:<p>- what project is the person working on?
- what "feature" are they working on?
- what are they trying to achieve at this very moment?<p>These questions are similar to a game<p>- what's the game the person is playing/or what character is the person playing/what teams am I looking at?
- what's happened so far?
- what's about to happen?<p>Summarise these as<p>- bigger picture context
- current historical context
- immediate and future intentions<p>And all of this should be gathered in about a minute with no interruption to the stream(er).<p>So far, no live coding experience has been able to satisfy this. I do believe that this is one of those cases where technology needs to solve the challenge. Either in the form of a new livecoding specific platform or better integrations in twitch/other live streaming platforms.