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.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.From my past experiences of her stream, my own streaming and others' streaming it feels like there's one big unsolved challenge in livecoding.Coding hasn't lent itself well to "liveness".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:- what project is the person working on?
- what "feature" are they working on?
- what are they trying to achieve at this very moment?These questions are similar to a game- 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?Summarise these as- bigger picture context
- current historical context
- immediate and future intentionsAnd all of this should be gathered in about a minute with no interruption to the stream(er).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.