So I tried live streaming last night...

What fun!

The interesting twist is that I wasn't gaming! I did it for software development!

It's probably not a new concept, but I came about the idea of streaming my coding sessions while talking with my wife about my presentations and community involvement. A really good friend of mine streams his League of Legends sessions and seems to have a lot of fun doing it. The sensation I got was similar to back in my early internet-faring days as I became aware of the breadth of people online.

My project of choice for this is kind of nice because it plays back into the streaming audience interest. Obviously to stream, you have to run some kind of source on your machine and the biggest game in town is something called OBS Studio. One neat feature of OBS Studio is that it allows you to configure a web-browser based overlay for your stream that simply inlines a web page into your stream.
This has caused a proliferation of web-based stream widget providers all vying for streamers to use them simply by copying and pasting a secret URI that renders a widget to their screen.

The Appeal

I think there are many different dynamics to the draw of watching someone code online. I also suspect most people take a combination of the benefits and never just one. Either for practical reasons to see someone coding to share in comprehension, for the social elements and oddly - for the sound.

Really in the end it's all about community and live streaming is one I totally underestimated.

Things to Improve

So yeah, I think I'm going to be doing this more often - time permitting. If it takes off in any magnitude, I'll probably have to cave and at least start streaming my voice.
Another issue is that internet connections where I live are horribly overpriced with upstream rates being a cruel fraction of downstream. So I'm going to have to figure something out on that front as the stream quality for coding has to be good enough for text to be legible.
The last thing would be that I have to make sure I only go as far as I've been able to plan out in my head. Otherwise things slow down a fair bit as I start humming and hawing over architecture. Usually thoughts I have while not at a computer.

Anyway, if after reading this, you're interested in watching me do some live coding, feel free to tune in!

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