
I am truly touched by the kindness and wit of everyone joining me each weekend. We have a lot of fun, and I like to call the live coding parts “massively multiplayer online pair programming”. These days I have more than a thousand followers, and a lovely subset of them are regular visitors who I call “the noopkat fam”. The tiny number of viewers I got that Saturday were really encouraging though, so I kept at it. I was very nervous, and I had stayed up late rehearsing everything I was going to do the night before. I believe I worked on Avrgirl-Arduino, which I still frequently work on while streaming. I gave it a go myself a week or so later, after setting up my Twitch channel and bumbling my way through using OBS. You can even see this comment I left under his video:

His open source life is very different to mine. I found it fascinating, as Nolan maintains open source libraries that get a lot of use and activity. Replying to issues on GitHub, triaging bugs, debugging code in branches, you name it. He explained everything he was doing along the way. I watched him streaming his open source work one weekend, and it was awesome. What tipped me over the edge of wishing I could do it to actually doing it is credited to Nolan Lawson, a friend of mine.

Handmade Hero was one of the first programmers I watched code online, quickly followed by the developers at Vlambeer who developed Nuclear Throne live on Twitch. Given that I was already in a niche on Twitch, why not be in an even smaller niche, like JavaScript powered hardware ) I signed up for my own channel, and have been streaming regularly since. I work on NodeJS hardware libraries a fair bit (most of them my own). Instead of gaming, which the majority of streamers on Twitch do, I wanted to stream the open source work I do in my personal time. I gave streaming a go for the first time last July.

By Suz Hinton Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch
