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Forget ‘Fortnite’ — Twitch Streamers Are Broadcasting Themselves Writing Code
Programmers use the platform to let people see their work and their world
As the world’s most popular livestreaming site—and a multibillion dollar Amazon property — Twitch is hardly new. But in recent years the web giant, which rocketed to success showing gamers at play, has started to branch out. As livestreaming setups have become cheaper and watching the web has continued to displace television time, many more types of streamers have joined the party. Today, Twitch has amateur musicians, home cooks, stream-of-life vloggers, and even ad hoc groups of people trying to help each other learn foreign languages. And now, you can also watch programmers programming.
At first glance, programming seems like a poor fit for livestreaming. The problem isn’t the long hours spent staring into a computer monitor — after all, that’s no different from Fortnite, which sucks up roughly 4 million hours of daily watch time on Twitch. The problem is that the average programming session is 10% meat and 90% filler. Moments of focused typing are broken up with reading Stack Overflow, staring blankly at the screen, fruitless Google searches, and contemplating broken builds. (And let’s not forget compiling.)
If it sounds awkward — well, sometimes it is. But the surprise is that clever streamers have found ways to make programming streams work. Consider long-time streamer handmade_hero (Casey Muratori), who runs a stream on weekends detailing the painstaking creation of a single game. Like many coding streams, Muratori is a professional programmer working on a passion project in his spare time. His stream has the essentials — a minimum two-camera view (large screen view, smaller face cam), a stream-of-coder-consciousness chat, and some seriously crunchy code. The project — now past its 600th session — is meant to serve as a de facto class on game design. It works because Muratori is constantly articulating what he’s doing, whether it’s spotting small problems or thinking through overarching design decisions. And what makes his stream unique is the fact that all his work is online — if the camera isn’t on, he isn’t working on the project.
