Here's an article that outlines how recording yourself write code can help with improving productivity: <a href="https://malisper.me/how-to-improve-your-productivity-as-a-working-programmer/" rel="nofollow">https://malisper.me/how-to-improve-your-productivity-as-a-wo...</a>.<p>> Watching Myself Code<p>> One incredibly useful exercise I’ve found is to watch myself program. Throughout the week, I have a program running in the background that records my screen. At the end of the week, I’ll watch a few segments from the previous week. Usually I will watch the times that felt like it took a lot longer to complete some task than it should have. While watching them, I’ll pay attention to specifically where the time went and figure out what I could have done better. When I first did this, I was really surprised at where all of my time was going.<p>> For example, previously when writing code, I would write all my code for a new feature up front and then test all of the code collectively. When testing code this way, I would have to isolate which function the bug was in and then debug that individual function. After watching a recording of myself writing code, I realized I was spending about a quarter of the total time implementing the feature tracking down which functions the bugs were in! This was completely non-obvious to me and I wouldn’t have found it out without recording myself. Now that I’m aware that I spent so much time isolating which function a bugs are in, I now test each function as I write it to make sure they work. This allows me to write code a lot faster as it dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to debug my code.<p>The main benefit comes from review. If you review the slow parts then you notice the patterns that slowed you down.
I would be very concerned with the "upload to YouTube" part.<p>Even private videos on YouTube can still be accessed by their engineers and might get exposed to the public in case of a bug.<p>Especially as a developer you most likely have access to confidential things, whether it's code (that could reveal internals of the business you're working for, or a very efficient algorithm that can be considered a trade secret and the company would want to protect it) or secrets (API keys, etc) that might be temporarily displayed on the screen while you're copy/pasting them around.
One thing I've been looking into is automated time dilation. I get that part of the thing with these sorts of screencasts is waiting for the host to think; but a lot of the time things are resolved with documentation instead. If you spend ten minutes waiting for the host to find the right documentation, it may not be the greatest.
> I find it funny that all of the videos have Copyright complaints, because I listen to a lot of music while coding.<p>Pretty ridiculous especially with private videos. I would definitely shop the upload to YouTube part if I tried this.
I love this. Thanks for sharing. I've been streaming myself and recording myself doing something always makes me narrate it through, when you are alone without a camera this feeling of having to "talk yourself through" is not there. This can of course easily be abused by a micro manager but uploading it as a private YT video, never thought of that.<p>Thanks for sharing, this is the stuff I browse HN for.
I would also like to know if this can improve productivity.
Watching me coding is the most boring thing I can think of so I doubt I would actually ever go back to those videos - I guess it’s more of a physiological trick
Taskwarrior sounds really interesting. I built my own pomodoro timer which has similar functionality, but it is browser-based and sometimes gets in the way.