
Belly.io – Curated List of Programming Coding Streamers - NickBusey
https://belly.io/programming
======
nbrochu
This is a great resource.

Programming has always been a second-class citizen on Twitch and has quite the
fabled history. It started with people uniting under specific games when
nothing other than gaming was allowed. A "Game Programming" category was
eventually added as a special exception. Then Twitch launched Creative as the
first non-gaming category. There was initial hype, Game Programming slowly
died as a result and Programming was eventually made a sub-community of
Creative (i.e. not visible in the directory). Then IRL launched, proceeding to
lobotomize Creative and therefore what was left of Programming. When IRL got
out of hand, Twitch broke it down in multiple categories and for a glorious
14ish days, there was a full-blown Programming category visible in the
directory. It was too good to be true though and the recently launched and
anemic Science & Technology (as part of the IRL break-up) needed to be saved
from the embarrassment it was so they deleted Programming and told people to
stream there instead. We are back to people thinking there is no programming
content on Twitch.

Sad because it's a solid category with a lot of good content that no one can
find. Never understood Twitch's stubbornness in not exploring it as decent
vertical to develop.

Another resource worth checking out even if the formatting is a little jarring
is [https://github.com/bnb/awesome-developer-
streams](https://github.com/bnb/awesome-developer-streams). There is a lot of
overlap but it lists what people do on their channels.

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NickBusey
I just got done with this morning's stream [1]. I've been streaming my open
source work for a few months now and it's been fantastic. Having people come
and help work on the code with me and contribute commits that I can review
with them on the stream is amazing. Having dedicated, scheduled time to work
on the projects has been great too. But really, getting to know and interact
with the users of the software in real time is like nothing I've experienced
before online. We even just released v0.5 of HomelabOS today, in no small part
thanks to the help of my twitch viewers/channel[2]!

[1]
[https://www.twitch.tv/videos/429158038](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/429158038)
[2]
[https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/HomelabOS/tags/v0.5](https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/HomelabOS/tags/v0.5)

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small_fish
Twitch employee here. I've forwarded this up the chain. Maybe we can (finally)
get a "Programming" category.

~~~
runjake
I am new to Twitch (via this submission) and I was trying to navigate the
Twitch site to find more coders but came up dry.

 _Please_ make programmers more discoverable!

~~~
heyoni
DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!!!

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ben509
That's so odd. I can't imagine coding with an audience. Half of the time I'm
not even coding; at work I'm often writing up little tests in Jupyter to make
sure things do what I think they do. (Granted, this is porting straight Python
to Numba, which is subtly different and has a lot of limitations.)

Has anyone done this? Is it easier to focus or harder?

~~~
nbrochu
I have done it for about 1.5 years straight, 24+ hours a week. Currently on an
extended break to recharge my batteries but I'm definitely going back. It's
slightly addictive and you come to miss it. The best part is you eventually
end up knowing the other programming streamers which builds a sense of
community.

In my personal experience, the productivity hit is overstated. It's absolutely
harder to focus because of chat and the discussions that come with it, yes,
but at the same time you have a camera pointed at your face and your screen is
shown to the world. Whatever you normally do to distract yourself and
procrastinate... I can guarantee you don't.

You also build a resistance to interruptions over time, which is an amazing
skill for a programmer to have. I didn't believe it to be possible, but it
eventually became so easy to pause what I was doing, interact with chat for a
few minutes and instantly resume where I left off after.

To go even further, it's a great way to put in consistent work and keep
motivation up for large, long-term projects. I have built the entirety of the
Serpent.AI Framework
([https://github.com/SerpentAI/SerpentAI](https://github.com/SerpentAI/SerpentAI))
while live on my Twitch channel and I'm not sure I would have ever shipped it
otherwise. The interactive nature of live streaming can give you that nice
push on days you don't quite feel like it.

Streaming programming is not for everyone but I still recommend to give it a
try. The experience is hard to put into words. I've had a blast and got to
know great people.

~~~
charliepark
How do you get into it? I think it'd be neat to try, but have no idea how I'd
get going.

The Twitch "getting started" docs are surprisingly anemic. (Do they even have
a growth team? This seems like table stakes.)

For someone who hasn't ever watched Twitch, and really just wants to focus on
coding in a streaming context, do you have any "start looking here"
suggestions?

~~~
nbrochu
Not really a guide. Just a few bullet points.

Start messing around in OBS ([https://obsproject.com](https://obsproject.com))
and get as comfortable as you can using it. You can compose scenes, transition
between them, set up your audio and video encoding and preview everything
without streaming. You can make local recordings test things like volume
levels and audio sync. It's fantastic software and it's how you will operate
your stream.

For programming, things are as simple as they come: Have a main scene that
does display capture and perhaps overlay a camera. You can add more bells and
whistles if you want; the tools are pretty intuitive. I recommend also making
scenes for "Starting Soon", "BRB" and "Stream Over". Having a browser in
guest/incognito mode is a good idea. Be mindful of stuff like API keys,
secrets, passwords and personal information.

Once you are ready to make the leap, you can link your Twitch account to OBS
and when you press "Start Streaming" you'll be live shortly on your channel.

Before you do though, you'll want to spend a little time in your Twitch
dashboard to set up stuff like titles, categories, tags etc.

There is a lot more to it that you'll figure out along the line. Live
streaming is an iterative process and a skill / hobby that you perfect over
time. Have fun!

~~~
charliepark
Oh, solid. Thank you!

------
ctas
I've been streaming on Twitch for about a year, before pausing it. It was a
lot of fun as I'm a very talkative person, but in my opinion requires a lot of
discipline. Sessions were sometimes subnormally unproductive because I was
constantly distracted by the chat and getting pulled into complex
conversations. Setting a timer for myself to ignore the chat for 20 minutes
helped a bit though.

Pros:

    
    
      - meeting new people, sharing ideas
      - if you're lucky and have a lot of experienced people in the chat they can help you out and spot bugs, potential mistakes, etc.
    

Cons:

    
    
      - can be highly distracting and productivity-lowering
    

There might be more, but those are the most prominent things I can think of
right now.

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mertnesvat
I think it's not a new thing it's long been around and called Peer
Programming.

The only difference though there are more peers and sometimes it can become a
brainstorming, which is cool although it depends on the streamer because some
of them engage with viewers very less.

But in general, I think it's more beneficial than watching tutorial to see how
we can we approach a problem rather then solving it directly.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming)

------
thanatropism
I can see myself making streams like "scikit-learn from scratch" live at
regular intervals. Is twitch all the tooling you need? Is twitch.com "safe for
work"?

~~~
reificator
> _Is twitch all the tooling you need?_

You'd need streaming software (OBS Studio is generally recommended) as well as
a good microphone and optionally camera. Of course you'll want to have a tab
or two open to Twitch in order to monitor chat and your stream status.

> _Is twitch.com "safe for work"?_

I would err on the side of caution and say that Twitch is NSFW. Yes there's
`Twitch Creative` and `IRL` and `Just Chatting`, but the site is very much
centered around games. Every workplace is different though, so exercise your
own judgement.

Also, it's [https://twitch.tv](https://twitch.tv), but it looks like they've
got a redirect in place.

> _I can see myself making streams like "scikit-learn from scratch" live at
> regular intervals._

If you want to actually build up a following, you will need to be very
regular. Having a schedule is one of the most important things you can do to
have any level of success.

------
ksaj
This is pretty cool. Reminds me of the live webcam feeds that were popular for
a while (and probably still are).

Only problem is it sporadically fails to refresh, resulting in a white "Oh
Snap!" says-nothing-helpful browser error that forces me to reload the page
manually.

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scripthub
is it just me or is the page down?

~~~
ta-run
Can access the site itself but can't navigate to either /programming or /food.

~~~
djsumdog
I can't even get to the base page. nginx gateway error.

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marvion
Does anyone knows sysadmins who stream like this?

Topics like setting up deployment, servers, more complex server setups...

Or did someone tried to do streams on this topics?

I imagine this would be much cooler than defined tutorial videos..

~~~
keithnz
Not a lot, I've seen the odd thing on twitch, but it's definitely not common

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morenoh149
I did some streaming on youtube. Any way to list youtube streaming
programmers?

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hero76
502

~~~
dejaime
Can confirm Edit: seems to be back up

------
jaequery
i dig it

