

Ask HN: Do you enjoy watching others code (unedited)? - dennybritz

I&#x27;ve had this idea of making screencast of coding in a &quot;natural&quot; environment, with minimal editing. You&#x27;d see me building something, how I fail and debug things, look up stuff on the web, and so on.<p>I am wondering if other people would enjoy watching something like this, or would rather stick to fully edited high-quality screencasts?<p>Edit based on comments: Thanks for the responses so far. Just to clarify, it wouldn&#x27;t be a 5-hour long unedited video with me coding. It would be a focused video (30-60min or so) on a certain topic, with a later voiceover explaining what I&#x27;m doing, but no &quot;sophisticated&quot; editing or teaching.
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wallflower
I would encourage you to consider having a abridged version, in addition to
the unedited version. Or at the least, a blog post where the reader can
'scrub' the video to a part of interest (e.g. proverbial 11pm design
change/decision). Some of the best (and popular) blog posts out there detail
the process of creation, skimming over some of the more tedious parts, to
enhance the theme of the process of creating.

To echo the others, if you could annotate your thought process - it would be
helpful. I would put an analog clock up (less flashy than digital) to subtly
catalog the time of day in the video frames.

If you capture the raw output, you can always speed it up ala Notch building a
game.

To go to the next level, consider making a visualization of how you built the
app - after you've done it.

[1] [http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/18/notch-live-streams-
making-...](http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/18/notch-live-streams-making-a-
game-in-48-hours-listens-to-dubstep/)

~~~
dennybritz
Thanks, the scrubbing idea is great. I mainly want to get around the tedious
process of sophisticated editing. Maybe speeding up the recording at certain
parts (while doing a voiceover) is a middle ground.

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hardwaresofton
tldr - entertainment for onlookers will probably be low, but educational
content COULD be high (but requires more work on your part of course)

So I think that building is way more interesting for the person who is doing
the building. To keep engaged, you would have to essentially mind dump your
thought processes as you go, an incessant stream of words which couldn't keep
up with how fast you think/try solutions, etc.

At best, it would be a tutorial screencast on workflow, or a "how I develop"
piece (which could definitely serve it's uses, possibly if you created some
platform for people to share these screencasts, so people got a look at how
others worked or though even), and at worst, a really boring chance for people
to criticize each other.

I think the entertainment value would be very low, and learning/improvement
probability is high, but it's very hard to accomplish either of those things
without engagement.

Of course, You could build an entire successful youtube channel if you market
yourself as "regular guy builds X" or "regular guy builds a node app" or
"regular guy programs an arduino" so that people with little to no knowledge,
or those who are starting out, or those who love ridiculously indepth how-to
videos to watch. How you would differentiate yourself is probably how much
educational stuff you could pack in there (for example: a lot of screencasts
have some guy on a macbook using vim breezing through creating a node app, but
what about if your audience has just graduated from a raspberry pi they got as
a gift? How would they learn how to build/download/install vim? how to use
vim? how to even get node installed? etc).

~~~
dennybritz
Thanks! It's funny, in fact that's exactly what I was thinking. Building a
platform to share these kind of screencast with a low barrier of entry. Of
course, the first series of screencast would be me building the platform.

~~~
hardwaresofton
well that does sound pretty good -- Also, I (as well as you, judging from your
response), could be completely wrong, and the idea fills some immense niche
that no one knew existed, or that didn't exist until you made the thing.
That's kind of how the world works sometimes.

Also, you should do a thorough check to see whether it exists yet, before
building something like this of course.

I Google & DDG'd "screencasts" and found some thing similar, but not quite
this idea (startup-iest ones I saw near the top of the list, older near
bottom): [http://tekpub.com/](http://tekpub.com/)
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts)
[http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/programmers](http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/programmers)
[http://screencasts.org/](http://screencasts.org/)
[http://www.screencast.com/](http://www.screencast.com/)
[https://peepcode.com/](https://peepcode.com/)
[http://www.screenr.com/](http://www.screenr.com/)

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ragatskynet
I like to watch people in person and via the Internet also. It is interesting
to see other aspects of working, how they write code, debug and so on. Well,
this goes for everything I think: the more aspects you try to look through the
more experiences you get and you can extract the best ideas that work for you.
I would encourage you to do this kind of thing, maybe the later voiceover is
not the best idea - the "actual" voices or explanations can be very useful and
sometimes funny/entertaining as well.

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bjourne
This guy's videos is amazing:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU8kWMMXrQ8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU8kWMMXrQ8)
I'd probably watch them if they where like his.

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sturmeh
Only in person.

I like to ask questions, and make suggestions.

I wouldn't want to watch someone code something I have no context of in a
language I barely know when I can't actually talk to them.

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t0
It could be more of a motivator instead of educational or entertaining. Just
seeing others getting things done sort of rubs off on you.

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hpsoar
5-hour is too long, i think that's the reason people would like edited ones

