Live coding has emerged as a compelling medium for developers to showcase their skills, engage with communities, and build personal brands. It's a digital stage where the immediacy of programming meets the unpredictability of live performance, creating a unique interactive experience for both the coder and the audience.
Embarking on a live coding journey is akin to setting sail on open waters; it's thrilling, challenging, and often uncharted territory for many developers. It demands a balance between the intimacy of coding in solitude and the public nature of streaming your process in real time. As such, the experience of live coding is multifaceted. On one hand, it fosters growth and camaraderie among developers who share a passion for technology. On the other, it can be fraught with the pressures of public scrutiny and the demand for constant engagement.
Live coding is not merely about writing code; it's also about storytelling and sharing one's development journey with an audience. This creates a space where developers can find support and feedback, potentially accelerating their learning process. Yet, the dependency on real-time feedback poses a risk to a developer's self-reliance and growth. Too much reliance on audience input can lead to superficial learning, where understanding is shallow, and problem-solving skills are underdeveloped.
Creating a positive online environment is crucial for a successful live coding stream. A toxic or disruptive audience can significantly detract from the experience, while a supportive and engaged community can enhance it. Curating an audience, therefore, becomes an art form in itself, requiring the streamer to establish rules and boundaries that encourage constructive interaction and deter negative behavior.
Beyond live coding, there are myriad avenues for personal branding within the tech industry. Content creation, in its various forms, offers developers the opportunity to share their expertise and insights. Whether it's through blogging, video tutorials, or podcasts, finding the right medium that resonates with an individual's style and preferences is key to building a strong personal brand.
As the developer's role continues to evolve in this digital era, the importance of content creation and personal branding cannot be overstated. Developers who share their journey authentically and engage with their audience effectively can carve out a unique space in the tech community. This not only helps in building a personal brand but also creates connections that can lead to professional growth and opportunities.
Disclaimer: The following may contain product affiliate links. I may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these links. I will only ever provide affiliate links for apps that I've used and highly recommend.
Live coding has emerged as a compelling medium for developers to showcase their skills, engage with communities, and build personal brands. It's a digital stage where the immediacy of programming meets the unpredictability of live performance, creating a unique interactive experience for both the coder and the audience.
Embarking on a live coding journey is akin to setting sail on open waters; it's thrilling, challenging, and often uncharted territory for many developers. It demands a balance between the intimacy of coding in solitude and the public nature of streaming your process in real time. As such, the experience of live coding is multifaceted. On one hand, it fosters growth and camaraderie among developers who share a passion for technology. On the other, it can be fraught with the pressures of public scrutiny and the demand for constant engagement.
Live coding is not merely about writing code; it's also about storytelling and sharing one's development journey with an audience. This creates a space where developers can find support and feedback, potentially accelerating their learning process. Yet, the dependency on real-time feedback poses a risk to a developer's self-reliance and growth. Too much reliance on audience input can lead to superficial learning, where understanding is shallow, and problem-solving skills are underdeveloped.
Creating a positive online environment is crucial for a successful live coding stream. A toxic or disruptive audience can significantly detract from the experience, while a supportive and engaged community can enhance it. Curating an audience, therefore, becomes an art form in itself, requiring the streamer to establish rules and boundaries that encourage constructive interaction and deter negative behavior.
Beyond live coding, there are myriad avenues for personal branding within the tech industry. Content creation, in its various forms, offers developers the opportunity to share their expertise and insights. Whether it's through blogging, video tutorials, or podcasts, finding the right medium that resonates with an individual's style and preferences is key to building a strong personal brand.
As the developer's role continues to evolve in this digital era, the importance of content creation and personal branding cannot be overstated. Developers who share their journey authentically and engage with their audience effectively can carve out a unique space in the tech community. This not only helps in building a personal brand but also creates connections that can lead to professional growth and opportunities.
Disclaimer: The following may contain product affiliate links. I may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these links. I will only ever provide affiliate links for apps that I've used and highly recommend.
Welcome back to another web dev podcast episode where we help aspiring developers get jobs and junior developers grow. In this episode I'm going to be jumping into what I love and hate about live coding. I've been live coding for seven, eight years now something like that, ever since I was trying to become a developer. I started live coding on Twitch a long time ago and I've done it on and off and you know I've gotten to where I've averaged maybe about like 60 concurrent viewers with live coding. It's not a lot compared to what some people are at now, but it you know it keeps chat pretty active are live coding and when you are engaging with chat and you're talking with people, because a lot of people come in they want to talk with you and they're bored or they're lonely or they want to get your insight or they want to give their insight. Right, I think a lot of successful live coders they engage with chat and that's a double-edged sword, because that's how you grow your stream. You have meaningful conversations with people, you get to know them, they get to know you and you kind of turn it into a TV show, right, you can.
Don Hansen:
I would highly suggest getting a schedule. Sticking with that If it's too difficult to stick with the schedule, just hop on when you can, but ultimately, like, try to stick with a schedule at least a few days a week and just create this expectation that you're going to go live, and people will actually block out time on their calendars to go live with you. Right, they'll join your chat and they'll see what's going on, and sometimes they'll just put you in the background. Actually, most people, they just put you in the background and they just do other stuff. They'll code. It's kind of like they have someone to code with them and they just do other stuff. They'll code. It's kind of like they have someone to code with them.
Don Hansen:
And you know that's a really cool feeling, because becoming a developer can be very lonely at times, especially with a self-taught path, and so when I first started out, I actually knew no other developers and for a long time I was just learning on my own and I didn't have anyone to toss ideas out to. I had no one to check my code and I didn't even know if I was growing in the right direction as a developer. I didn't know if I was building the right things, I didn't know if I was learning the right things, and so there's a lot of good intention that can come from people giving unsolicited feedback in your live coding streams when you're first starting out. I think that can be helpful at times and it can be destructive at times. So let me explain. When you're starting out, you can get stuck and be stuck for a very long time. If you're not live coding, you just have to figure it out, and that can take a lot longer than it needs to, versus someone at least giving you a little nudge in the right direction in your chat chat. So the problem is when people give unsolicited feedback way too quickly.
Don Hansen:
What I see from a lot of developers on Twitch that are just starting out they'll keep reading chat and then they'll type in the code that they're being told to type in and they'll read again. Okay, this is your solution. Okay, this is what I'm not getting. I'm going to type this in. Right, you're not really learning and I think it's very easy, as a new developer, to really want to absorb what they're telling you. Put it into your app, to make your app better, to solve that problem that you've been stuck on, you know for the past 10, 20 minutes, but in reality you're not really growing. You're not really learning why this bug even occurred in the first place. And I see so many people that are just like, oh yeah, I get it, and they don't really get it, but they put in the code, it works, and then they move on. A lot of new developers do that. I think that's a huge mistake.
Don Hansen:
Where I think unsolicited feedback is really helpful is when you've been stuck for 20, 30 minutes and you have no forward momentum. You are clueless, which often means like you got to really work on your debugging process and you really have to probably learn or relearn the fundamentals Maybe you skipped over them that make up this concept that is causing you to get stuck, this concept that is causing you to get stuck, and when you are just leaning on chat to give you solutions to get out of that hole, you're not really identifying where you're going wrong and what you can do to improve. And good unsolicited feedback is feedback that kind of just nudges you in the right direction. Think about this concept or what do you think about, like these lines Like how do you interpret that? And you know they kind of just like nudge you towards the right direction and give you a little bit of a stepping stone rather than the solution. That is excellent.
Don Hansen:
Unsolicited feedback that you want, yeah, and I would be very careful about leaning on your chat too hard to build your application when you're live coding and maybe even make a rule like, hey, no one solicited feedback unless I've been stuck for like 20 minutes or something like that. I think that's a really good rule for new developers and when I was a new developer, I did not implement that rule and I thought I was growing. I thought I was like, oh, this is really cool, I'm getting a lot of people in chat, they're helping me, I'm growing. I wasn't really growing, not really and I got to a point where I really lacked so much fundamental foundational knowledge where I started encountering bugs more and more and more and I'm like, okay, it's, I have chat and they kind of help me, and then I think I understand, but it doesn't really sink in. But I thought it did Right and I just became dependent and that's what you want to avoid Now.
Don Hansen:
If you're a little bit more of an experienced developer, live coding can be fun and it can be a cool way to teach and get back, but you're also going to get a lot of unsolicited feedback, but often the unsolicited feedback that you get most of it's garbage. It just is. And let me give you a few examples. Let's say you have a full stack application and like, for example, you have Nodejs and you get a developer that comes in and just says oh yeah, applications built with Nodejs are just garbage. You should definitely switch to Python, you should switch to Go. No understanding of what you're trying to learn, no understanding of what you're trying to do, what you're trying to build, what your project requirements are, why you chose this language. They don't give a shit. They don't like your language. They make it clear and you need to use another language. That's garbage feedback. Of course. It's garbage feedback, right, and you get a lot of that. You get a lot of especially new well, even new developers, but people pushing new technologies that are very trendy and why aren't you using this?
Don Hansen:
And you're going to find that that kind of conversation derails you and you have to go into it with the expectation that you are not going to make a lot of progress on your app. If you want to grow with live coding, typically the strategy is to engage with your chat and it's okay if you're going to grow slower, but I would. If you really want to make meaningful progress with your app, you need to focus on code, you need to get into that flow state. You need to not look at chat as much, right, and this is kind of a hard thing to do and it's contradictory to a lot of advice that you get for growing as a streamer. But you have to decide do I want to grow as a live streamer, as a content creator, or do I want to get this project done but just showcase what I'm doing? You need to make that decision because I think a lot of people go into it thinking they can accomplish both and very rarely, especially as a new streamer, you're gonna accomplish that. It's a very rare occurrence.
Don Hansen:
So when you dive into live coding, truly think about, like, what you want to get out of it, because it can be a really fun experience. You can meet a lot of cool people, you can grow your community and content creation. I'm telling you, to me it's king for marketing. If you really want to push out a SaaS product, you want to build momentum with it, build excitement, hype with it, live code it. That is a really cool process and I've seen success in different people that have built applications that have had thousands of users to even just start, because they took, you know, six months. They took a year to build this out on stream and they got a lot of support and they just built an audience that was excited about what you're doing and what your product does. But, more importantly, they're excited that they got to meet you right. That's why content creation is king of marketing. Um, because when you're transparent and you share your thoughts and you connect with the people that are watching your content, they, um, you could build any product and you're gonna have an audience that actually cares about looking into it, and so you already have an audience behind you that wants to support what you're doing. That's a phenomenal way to build, kind of a SaaS product. I think that's an awesome thing to do.
Don Hansen:
If you are an experienced developer, you're like I want to try to build a SaaS product and I want to build a gain, supplemental income, or I want to try to achieve financial freedom and eventually start my own business. Content creation is king for that and I think you should consider that. But you have to understand that as you grow your audience, you're going to have to guard your time. You're going to have to guard your attention. It's going to be really hard to make progress if you also want to grow your audience. So just understand why you're going into it and prioritize, set rules in your live chat and I think it can work out really well. And keep in mind you are the content creator. You, you own that channel.
Don Hansen:
You can literally, if people are just being annoying with unsolicited feedback, or they're being annoying and being disruptive, or they're trying to be, they're parasocial or they're trying to dig into like really personal issues of yours, you're like I'm just trying to build this project right. You could just ban them. You just ban them, like so many live streamers tolerate so much crap from viewers because they think it will kill the vibe, because they banned someone and they had to be harsh your chat because you are going to be going live every day that you've scheduled, hopefully, and you want to go live. You don't want to go live with a lack of excitement because you're like I got to deal with these few people. No, when you find yourself avoiding live streams because you don't want to deal with a certain type of chatter, that means you need to start banning that chatter. You need to enjoy these live streams because it should be a long-term strategy. You should have fun with it.
Don Hansen:
So many content creators give up because there are just certain chatters they don't want to deal with that bring them anxiety, that just, or they're just annoying and they just don't want to deal with it. Ban them. I am telling you you are going to feel at peace when you do this and you are strict with it and you get mods that are strict with it that can actually do it for you. Just ban, curate your audience and allow people that kind of just sometimes it's just a vibe check like they're just ruining the vibe. They're or you know, they're just viewers that have a really good presence about them and they they just make more of a positive vibe, more of a constructive vibe in a live coding stream. You're like I want these people. You can give more attention to those people and ban people that just disrupt that. It really is that simple and I really want to encourage people like, if you want to ban, just ban. It's going to serve your community better. Long-term.
Don Hansen:
People are actually going to appreciate that, they're going to respect that you're willing to just push people out that don't need to be there, that are just annoying, because there are a lot of live streams that keep those people in and then you get an audience that doesn't really chat. They don't interact with you because you have other really toxic people that might chime in. You're like, oh crap, I didn't want to hear from them. I just wanted to chat with the cool people here. I wanted to talk to the streamer but I got this annoying person saying that, like, these five languages suck and you aren't a real developer If you're working with these languages, it's like people are just going to leave the stream at that point. So curate your audience, ban people, and I think you're going to have a really good experience with live coding, and I think that's the key and this is why I'm really emphasizing this If you want to live code, it's a really cool experience.
Don Hansen:
You get to learn, you get to curate a community that's perfect for you, that you vibe with, they vibe with you, and you need to moderate your community in a way that's going to set you up in the long run for success and enjoying your stream for a long period of time, because a lot of live streamers just give up. They do and I think it's because of this. So you have to think about what you're doing into live coding for why you're even doing that, versus like solo. Because you can. You could build out a project and make tons of progress. Like, if you're just trying to build a sass product, you could just do that. If you're trying to go through a tutorial based project, you could just do that and you're gonna make a lot more progress when you're doing it solo. And so I think a lot of people just they live code because it gives them motivation, they wake up, they're excited to engage with their audience, and you need to make sure that every time that you live stream, you're excited to do that. If you're not, you're probably going to give up, like most people do. So I think live coding is really cool.
Don Hansen:
I don't think it's for everyone I really don't and you don't have to live code. If you're trying to become a developer. I think it's really. It's a great idea to build and focus on your self-branding, and you could do that through other forms of content and create YouTube videos and create blog articles. You could just create LinkedIn articles. You can engage with people and have meaningful discussion on LinkedIn and build connections that way. There are so many ways that you can be transparent about who you are as a developer and what you think as a developer, and you know what your strong opinions are and you know what you're excited to learn, like you could be transparent in other forms of content. You don't have to live code to do that, because I think sometimes people or newer developers hear that, like, all of them should live code. It's a great thing to build your self-branding not really, I think there's.
Don Hansen:
Everyone has a preference for a medium and you can create all sorts of content. You can even just record audio files and create a podcast of your thoughts, uh, about you growing as a developer and like some of the stuff that you struggled with. You can create a podcast of your thoughts about you growing as a developer and like some of the stuff that you struggled with, and you can create a podcast full of like 100 episodes. And you know, self branding is it's supposed to be a long term strategy for aspiring developers, but you, you have to find the medium that works for you, because if you don't and you live code someone else told you to live code you're not going to do it long term you are going to give up, and what was the point of that? I mean, I guess you tried it, but try a bunch of different mediums and see if it works for you, because there are a lot of good strategies for aspiring developers. Just find your medium is what I'm saying.
Don Hansen:
You don't have to live code, but if you want to enjoy it, curate your audience and have fun with it, and I think you're going to love it. So I know if anyone's tried live coding, let me know in the comments. I'm kind of curious. I feel like I do see a lot of people give up and I have my own gripes with live coding. Personally, I don't like a lot of unsolicited feedback.
Don Hansen:
I find enjoyment in problem solving in myself and I find that a lot of people have good intention in the chat, but I don't. I don't want their solutions, I want to figure this out. I have fun with that Don't take my fun away and I like getting into a flow state right. So I don't even know if live coding is for me. I'm doing it currently, but you know, like I got to make sure that it is fun for me, it is enjoyable and I'm going to enforce rules to make sure that happens, and I just encourage you to do the same.
Don Hansen:
You might love it, you might hate it. I think it's worth trying at least. But at the very least, find your medium and be transparent about your dev process. Build up that self-branding, no matter what type of content you choose to create. I think it's a good strategy for almost everyone, but it's live coding for you. You got to figure that out on your own. But yeah, anyways, let me know in the comments what you think. If you're considering it, if you're anxious about it, anything like that, let me know. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.
