I Stream Now!

September 16th, 2024

(4-minute read)

Introduction

Last month, I started streaming on Twitch. It's something I've been wanting to do for 2-3 years now, and I finally took the leap and pressed the button to go live.

It's been going reasonably well so far! I've been mostly focused on live coding--going through some product tutorials and building a website for a hackathon submission. I don't have a huge audience yet, but that's okay. There are a few regulars who come through to hang out, and we have a good time.

Why stream?

There are a bunch of different reasons I wanted to get into livestreaming:

1) I miss teaching.

In my current role as an instructional designer, I write a bunch of courses to teach people how to build apps. But then once I'm done building the course, I hand it off to the team of instructors, and they're the ones who actually teach it to students. It's nice to have a clearly defined set of responsibilities, but I miss getting to work with students directly, to see how the material works for them and how I can improve it in the future.

2) I miss having a community.

Back in the days when Twitter was still Twitter, I was fairly active in the Tech Twitter community. I made a bunch of online connections and friendships there, and I liked having a window into what folks were building and learning and thinking. But then with the CEO shift, I chose to stop using the platform, and suddenly I lost touch with that community.

I'm only recently realizing how isolating and lonely it's felt since then. I've been trying to find a replacement, and I've joined a bunch of Discords and Slack channels and newsletters with various constellations of the people I'd connected with before, but it doesn't quite feel the same. I'm hoping that streaming will be a way to reconnect with old friends and also build connections with new friends.

3)To normalize what it looks like to learn new things.

I've worked with a lot of entry-level developers looking to break into the tech industry. One thing that comes up consistently is imposter syndrome. Often folks feel like their skills aren't good enough, or they're afraid of being "found out" because they didn't know something. And I understand where they're coming from, because I felt like that when I was a junior developer too.

But as I paired with more senior developers, I realized that there were often times when they didn't know how to do things either! The difference was that they knew how to take a step back, ask questions, and investigate the problem to figure out how to get themselves unstuck. Or if they couldn't figure it out themselves, they knew how to word a question to ask for help. I want my streams to normalize this process for newer devs, so that they can see that getting errors and debugging is a normal part of the development process. No one is born knowing how to do any of this.

Looking forward

I have a bunch of ideas for things to learn or build on stream. For now, I'm trying to focus on staying consistent and streaming at least once a week to build the habit.

I'm still figuring out what day and time works best for my schedule, but you can follow me to get notifications when I go live (😉). I'm also uploading all my VODs to YouTube afterward, if you want to catch them after the fact.

I also want to be more consistent about writing up my learning notes into blog posts, so stay tuned for more cheat sheets and technical articles. Lots of fun stuff coming soon! Excited to have you along for the ride!