This brought back a memory from the way back machine. Back in the early days of computers, many of them like the C64 or TRS80 (circa 1985-ish) had an option to use a TV as a monitor to save money. I recall that I had a Trash 80 and it was hooked up to the TV with a cable splitter in a spare bedroom. There were a number of relatives and friends visiting and myself someone that shared my love of computing were in the there programming away, and really programming, we are talking assembler here. And after a couple of hours we came down to the living room and everyone had the TV on channel 3 and everyone was watching us (I did not realize the splitter was broadcasting throughout the cable in our house). I guess there was nothing better on back them before cable had 100's of channels. It was interesting to hear the non-programmers questions and comments about what we were doing and really how much they had actually picked up on.
Along these lines, I recently started watching (and enjoying!) Casey Muratori's <i>Handmade Hero</i>, "an ongoing project to create a complete, professional-quality game accompanied by videos that explain every single line of its source code."<p><a href="https://handmadehero.org/" rel="nofollow">https://handmadehero.org/</a>
This may be a good place to ask this question -- I think I saw a website which had videos of how well-respected experts write projects from start to finish. So, if I were interested in learning how experts in golang write a web-service end-to-end (design, DB, write, test, deploy, debug), I could watch those videos and learn the right(ish) way to write a web-service in golang. I'm sure I'll learn a few other things too (like how they replaced a block of code in vim in 4 keystrokes where it would have taken me 12). Does anything like that exist? If not, then that sounds like a fantastic opportunity to me.
Recently, I was amazed at how fast one of our devs were. When trying to see what made him so fast, it was a combination of being very good at reading code and understanding the underlying structure of the code, and also he was very fast with his editor. I could barely follow what he was doing as he was tracing his way through the code.<p>Watching him work as we were discussing an architecture made me more inspired to type faster, learn my tools better, and get better at reading code.
After ~60 minutes of random debugging in production. If anyone noticed any weirdness(like a lot of repeated streams / streams disappearing) -- we're sorry. Looks like everything should work now.<p>Just a bit of technical details for curious: twitch streams are painful to deal with. Twitch channel != youtube channel. Twitch channel is akin youtube video(or stream) but with offline/online status. Mapping "online/offline" statuses into proper upcoming/live/completed statuses isn't straightforward. Differentiating between different "streams" is also difficult(i.e. user streams twice on two different days, but the link stays the same).<p>Also, twitch api often returns 5XX errors.<p>Bug reports are welcome here: avp-13@yandex.ru<p>Also, if you want to be notified about upcoming streams, then you can subscribe to subreddit(<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode</a>), subscribe on the website, or follow <a href="https://twitter.com/WatchPeopleCode" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/WatchPeopleCode</a>.
I offer these quotations from well known figures as a mental antidote to the 'churn things out fast' / 'learn all the editor shortcuts' mentality being promoted throughout some of the comments.<p><i>The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.</i> - Doug McIlroy<p><i>You're not to come up with a simple design through any kind of coding techniques or any kind of programming language concepts. Simplicity has to be achieved above the code level before you get to the point which you worry about how you actually implement this thing in code.</i> - Leslie Lamport<p><i>Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.</i> - Doug McIlroy<p>... from my <i>fortune</i> clone @ <a href="https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup</a>
OT slightly: Why do some YouTube embeds (including the one on this site) not contain a full screen button? It drives me nuts. Especially here as to actually see what's happening full screen is essential. The only way to get full screen is to click the YouTube button to actually go to YouTube and full screen it from there.
Side question: I'd like to stream some audio content to a few 1000 people (24/7) and wondered if anyone knew (back of the envelope) what the cost model for this would look like? Assuming it's just bandwidth unless I go p2p... Just trying to understand the current lay of the land as I remember the youtube guys were paying $$$/mo for bandwidth when they first started. Thanks.
This is interesting!<p>While I think it'd be difficult to <i>fully</i> learn how to implement something from this (read: tedious), I do see it as a cool way to learn how other people think about and solve problems. If it means anything, I watched a good five minutes of the guy working on the Arduino code without thinking about turning it off.
I like this idea! Having the option to watch people code their games live is also a feature I enjoy on the Ludum Dare site. I often tune in to Twitch channels to watch people write code, only for a few minutes mostly, but it does make me feel connected and sometimes there are interesting things to discover.<p>I'm less sure about your choice of data source, though. /r/WatchPeopleCode is fine if you're already active on Reddit, but given the fact that people need to actively register there means you're missing out on a lot of programming streams.<p>In my opinion it would be a better idea to automatically pull a list of programming streams from Twitch, Youtube, and Hitbox just using the appropriate key words.
I'm more concerned that twitch.tv is already good and has it's own culture developed for this. Unless some extra meta data type stuff is added like which language, which subjectd, which editors, which techniques etc are added in a very useful way.
I wonder if there is an viable alternative to YouTube. I find the idea intersting and could see people gaining something from watching others code, but sadly live streams are yet another thing I cannot use without a proxy.<p>There seem to be legal problems with them in Germany or is it some European law and other countries are also blocked? Does anyone know what exactly the problem is? Just potential copyright infringements from audio in the background e.x.?
The feedback on these streams makes this a really incredible idea. I just watched one where users were constantly noticing syntax errors, etc. and alerting the dev in real time of them. A few people on these streams are learning languages (like Lua) for the first time and powering through these projects with aid from viewers/commenters. Love it.
Would it be better performance wise to get the Twitch.tv/YouTube/etc. summary of what they're showing and present that first, and if you're interested to click on the summary then you can load the video? Loading all of those videos at once is pretty heavy, at least for my mbp.
Apparently it's possible to embed a HTML5 Twitch player instead of Flash. Would it be possible to use this?<p><a href="http://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/html5-embedded-player/150/3" rel="nofollow">http://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/html5-embedded-player/150/3</a>
Another great place to find dev streams (game developers):<p><a href="http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Game%20Development" rel="nofollow">http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Game%20Development</a>
I like this idea. It isn't the most common thing to shadow someone while they code, you can learn a lot from how people "flow".<p>The site can be a lot better. I think it has potential if curated properly. I'd watch.<p>+1
I don't understand how this adds more value than the other places on the web. A blog, tutorial video, stackoverflow post, book, etc will provide more knowledge in less time than watching someone real-time code and step through the software writing process. I understand the game channels on twitch provide entertainment, but don't see how this will catch on widely. Would love to hear others thoughts.
Well, this was kind of fun! I just finished streaming 6 hours of UX development. Didn't expect much of an audience, but in the end there were over a hundred viewers (I bet most came via HN). I'll definitely be doing this again soon :)
Love it. I hope this gets popular.<p>And sort of sad because people seem to be able to do more then 10 minutes at a time without alt-tabbing to HN or lolcats for pointless distraction.