I’m Armin, I built shipstreams.com. Inspired by Pat Walls building "You Don't Need WordPress" live on Twitch in 24h, I created this list of makers streaming their work!
After many hours on Twitch I found many cool people doing so much great work. There is always to learn something while looking over someone's shoulder :)
If you want to add yourself and build with us, you can use the Submit Form. - I’m especially on the lookout for more streaming women makers!
In the future, I'd like to add Youtube-Code-Steamers as well, or maybe you know of other Websites who host some Makers? Could see shipstreams as an aggregator for all of them :)
Amazing. In sort of a weird mirrored telepresent universe, I clicked on one of the Shipstreams to find the maker checking Hackernews and "shipping live" on Shipstreams.
https://ibb.co/hN5b6z
Hi Armin, looks great! I can see this being a valuable resource for people that want to understand how great coders do their thing.
I'd suggest adding Jonathan Blow, an indie game developer of Braid and The Witness who designs and builds his own games and game engines on stream: https://twitch.tv/naysayer88
Also, I notice there are very few female developers on your list. I think it would be of great service to the programming community to find some women and add them to your list.
Genuine question: What is the appeal of watching live coding? Who watches these? I'm watching code all day long, arguing about it, understanding it on my workplace, if I get home, there is no way I want to watch another guy live coding. Maybe doing my own thing when I'm free and not tied to a gazillion rules of how to do things.
I sometimes throw a quieter stream on in the background. It makes me feel like I'm in an office space when I'm coding by myself which sometimes helps me focus.
I never usually have a stream on for more than 10-15 minutes at a time, but other than the nice sound of keyboard typing I also enjoy trying to be helpful or just poking in and seeing what other people are working on.
I used to stream and my audience was students, beginners, junior engineers etc...
I had a few senior engineers watching when I streamed more advanced Devops, React, Python etc.. But in general, that was the division.
There is a big gap in software education from the tutorial to the point of dealing with real world and real life problems, people are attracted to seeing how you would solve things that come up in real life and that's where they get most of the value.
Viewers often view this during work, so they have some white-noise type from the keyboard typing and voice.
The main point in streaming and watching streams in my mind is the sense of community, people ask A LOT of questions and get a ton of value from it (depends on the streamer)
Not everyone interested in programming works as a programmer, and not everyone who works as a programmer has good peers to learn from! I have very occasionally watched some live streamed coding, usually because I’m interested in learning more about a particular technology or a particular person’s approach to solving problems.
I find it strangely appealing. A football player may train all day long but that doesn't mean he wouldn't like to see a game on TV. But I may be strange. I find that I enjoy programming more when I'm playing a coding podcast in the background, for some reason. Perhaps because coding is a lonely activity.
I think the appeal is the same for watching any other high performance. Specifically, it can be entertaining to see how others do things, and there is potential for you to pick up some useful knowledge in the form of a problem solving technique, or maybe a workflow you haven’t considered.
No... For example, let's imagine a developer needs to find the source of a bug on a big rails app. All he knows of the bug is that a certain line of logged SQL should be near the location. He knows how to trigger the bug. A simple method call triggers a myriad of unknown things, one of which is where the bug lies. He gets the idea to write a method that takes a regex and a block and temporarily override the logging method while the block executes so that it outputs a backtrace when logging a line that matches the given regex. The method is called, the backtrace is output, and the bug is found.
Development ideas and methodologies like that don't appear in code.
You feel connected and motivated. It also can be fascinating seeing how people go about doing things (well or not).
I don't watch people code, but I do watch people study (or have it on while I code).
Yesterday, I was doing some after-work hobby-coding while listening to ChilledCow (on YouTube). There's a cartoon girl studying and writing in a notebook. The animation revamps endlessly, while lofi hip-hop is playing in the background. I have it on, because its very soothing to have something on and grind through a task after work.
This is actually a thing. Another channel "The Strive Studies" features a girl studying for her medical licence (something like that). Just jazz music and 1-3 hours of her reading and typing.
Basically, anything can become social, and coding/studying while someone is coding/studying can become highly motivating. You know they are going through the same stress and working towards some goal. Its fun to be part of that process. But, it somehow opens your mind up that "you are not alone".
So, yea, virtual study/coding groups are a great way to motivate.
I watch Adam13531's BotLand twitch channel when I work at home. He's also been posting them on youtube for the past few years. I am interested to see how other talented programmers work, without having to look over my colleagues' shoulders at work.
Adam keeps a really well organized programmers' log and todo list, and I've incorporated that into my own daily work.
I occasionally watch programmers stream, usually it's game devs. I find it quite relaxing, there are usually opportunities to support the developer by offering some knowledge, and I often end up learning something too.
Another genuine question: What is the appeal of streaming live coding? Why would you want a bunch of strangers watching you write? Does an audience help the process in some way, or is it a way to feel less lonely, or what?
I find list useful, I was trying to find such streams earlier with no luck. Unfortunately I only found 2 dead accounts by searching for programming, maybe it is just I am not that familiar with twitch.
Wonderful, This is exactly what I was looking for a few days ago and someone already did it. twitch is primarily a place for gamers but good to see programmers. I follow Stephen Wolfram and Holden Karau 's live coding and code reviews.
Nice to see some manual curation in this space. For some reason, I've found Twitch's categorization of this type of stream to be challenging to find (i.e. it's under creative, but hard to filter from the rest of that category unless people specifically tag it things like development or programming).
I could be wrong, as I don't often browse Twitch, but you might want to take another look. From what I heard they've killed IRL and Creative and replaced them with more segmented categories.
Good stuff, I remember seeing Walls' tweet [0], and watching this site go up on Product Hunt soon after he finished. I do wonder though, is this a more focused version of Twitch's Programming directory [1]?
There's also the possibility of swatting[1]. There are videos online of people streaming when suddenly their home is broken into by officers, rifle in hand, yelling at them to get on the ground.
I streamed on Twitch for a while [1], the change they made with the categories now officially kills off programming streams and show that they don't really care about it.
Curating streams this way is very useful and looks good.
Heya! I just wanted to say thanks for your streams. I haven't been watching streams in general lately due to life being much busier, but yours in particular were super interesting and I learned a ton!
This is cool, twitch and youtube are both great platforms to stream.
It’s funny there was a new platform linked here on HN I think a few years ago, and it did pretty well, I streamed on it for a while, but it never got the traction they wanted so they pivoted to live edu or something.
This getting to the front page shows me that it’s better to start very small and work from there if you want to make a new community.
I’m not saying that shipstreams is going to host their own streams one day, independent of twitch or youtube, but given a good start like this, it’s at least a possibility.
Great idea, but none of the livestreaming coders I follow on Twitch are listed. Stephen Wolfram is a notable omission but there are some other great livestreams on Twtich creative.
wow, i never knew about that! just reading through the comments, i don't particularly find anything offensive with Michael's responses. am i missing something?
I’m Armin, I built shipstreams.com. Inspired by Pat Walls building "You Don't Need WordPress" live on Twitch in 24h, I created this list of makers streaming their work!
After many hours on Twitch I found many cool people doing so much great work. There is always to learn something while looking over someone's shoulder :)
If you want to add yourself and build with us, you can use the Submit Form. - I’m especially on the lookout for more streaming women makers!
In the future, I'd like to add Youtube-Code-Steamers as well, or maybe you know of other Websites who host some Makers? Could see shipstreams as an aggregator for all of them :)
Cheers and see you Live, Armin
Links: Telegram Notification Channel: http://t.me/shipstreams Submit Form: https://shipstreams.com/submit Github: https://github.com/arminulrich/shipstreams.com (Laravel + Vue.js - hacked together in 24 hours )