[kragen]

I've learned a lot of shell and editor techniques from pair programming that I couldn't have picked up by cloning projects on GitHub and might never have stumbled across on my own. Sometimes they're even in the manual, but I haven't read the whole Vim manual. (Have you?)

James Hague wrote a thing about "coding as performance" 14 years ago that I think about pretty often: https://prog21.dadgum.com/28.html He's talking about cases where getting something crappy running fast is what matters most: "If you can write a program to solve the problem in less time than the tedium of slogging through the manual approach, then you win." I did this yesterday: I was trying to track down a segfault a coworker wanted more information about, and so I threw together a quick Python script (specific to this build of this program) that reformatted GDB's backtrace into something a little more comprehensible. It's dirty and probably nobody else will ever see it, but many people could have learned useful things if they'd had the chance to watch.

It can be entertaining to watch people who are much faster than I am.

That said, I've almost never watched anyone livecoding on a streaming video platform or on YouTube.