Intro to Twitch: Join the Live Coding Community!

Houston are we where are you yep yep yep just kidding i know we’re live hello everyone welcome thank you for sticking around to the end here and we have more to go after this so don’t go anywhere hopefully i can bring the energy back because i you know it’s that time of day

You feel a little lull baby you know grab that tea grab that coffee whatever you need let’s get into talking about twitch now i’m going to cut right to the chase i’m brian clark i go by clarkio but let’s cut right into the intro to twitch i want to talk to

You all you’re here you’re part of this conference you’re viewing the you’re viewing the conference and you’re looking to make maybe a change into development right you’re trying to start that career you’re looking for a new start and the reality of that right maybe you’re looking to get a job

In development too right and the reality of that is it’s going to be it’s going to take some time kind of like what pj was talking about you’re going to have some failures you’re going to get through that excellent talk by pj shout out to pj for

That but it’s going to take some time and one thing you can do while you’re taking that time learning stuff is documenting your journey and the reason i bring this up is i want to share a story of a buddy of mine he goes his name he doesn’t go by his name is

Danish gajar and uh he’s somebody that i met on instagram and uh i’ll tie all this in why i want you to document your journey with all this stuff while you’re learning development and going through this process the niche was somebody that was working in a different industry as well and i

Know you heard a lot of several stories from folks today and you’re going to hear more tomorrow but in particular the nisha’s story is interesting to me because the niche was working as a designer so not too far off from the development industry but enough to where he wanted to make

The change to jump over to development and while he was doing that he started doing things like learning using resources tutorials courses online but while he was doing that he was documenting his journey and what i mean by that is for him instagram was like a home for

Him and he enjoyed that social media platform but it could be something different for others but for him it was instagram and so what he would do is he would post pictures of his code or his just setup and then in the post itself he would

Describe what he was learning and he was learning about css he was learning about htmls and javascript and as he was doing that it was great for him because he was keeping a reference of whatever everything he learned so he can go back and look at it

In case he needed a reminder but he was also sharing that with the community so other developers on the platform which there are quite a bit on instagram by the way um you’re sharing it with them so that they can find it helpful and get value out of it

But then on top of it here’s the really like really interesting thing that surprised me when i first heard it was he actually got a job because of all that his current employer now uh and his current manager right now had reached out to him via dms on instagram saying hey you know

I’ve been seeing this journey you’ve gone through i i love the progress you’ve made and i love what you’ve been sharing would you be interested in taking an interview with us and then that’s all she wrote kind of thing and he has the job and he’s been working there ever since

And i really believe that that’s one way i’m not saying everybody has to go through this but it’s a nice way to there’s lots of value in doing that and that’s why i bring up that story now you might be thinking well brian that’s instagram you’re supposed to be talking about

Twitch what are you doing it’s just another platform right so instagram is documenting it one way twitch is another way you can document your journey as you’re learning and doing this this thing you’re going through this process and so uh in fact i have a very another another

Very another another very quick story there’s another buddy of mine whose streams on twitch and uh he was already an engineer but he was getting into developer relations he wanted to and uh he was streaming and they checked out his streams and that helped him land the job that he

Has now too so to give you a more concrete example that but that out of the way hopefully that inspired you to think maybe maybe i could try out twitch maybe this might be for me to to do that to document what i’m doing as i go through this so enough moving on

Twitch what is it we talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the conference but if you missed it here’s a quick reminder let’s start sharing my screen here so when you go to twitch.tv you enter that into the url on your favorite browser you get this

Presentation you get this ui that shows to you this user interface the main thing you’re going to look for is the search bar at the top uh you type in there where everybody that’s streaming programming they typically stream under the category science and technology now i say category because they’re

Typically with twitch it’s it’s known for gaming and a lot of times folks would think of it as different games somebody might stream fortnite or microsoft flight simulator or uh minecraft right those would be game categories but twitch has opened up to having other categories as part of their platform

One of them being science and technology there’s art there’s all kinds of different content so even if you maybe you are familiar with that other stuff maybe you have skills in another area maybe you’re an artist right for fun you could stream that stuff and start doing that but we’ll get

Into the weeds of that in a minute so science and technology that is where folks that are programming stream under that category for the most part so you search for that it’ll bring you to this next view so in here this is going to show you all the live streams

At the moment in time that you search for the science and technology category that’s streaming under this category from there you’re going to want to probably look at tags because that’s going to let you zoom in on exactly what it is what type of programming do you what type of

Science and technology stream do you want because there are other things going on in here there’s like ducks and chickens and turtles and earthquakes which is science and technology related yes but may not be what you’re looking for i mean check it out if you’re interested you know you might like it apparently

You can feed them uh according to that first one on the bottom left there but you want to get into the programming streams right so you look at the tags there and you can click on those or add those to your search and that will you know drill down into the programming

Streams from there once that’s done you get your results and that’s what all those little rectangles are it’s like little tv boxes and you can see what people are streaming um you get a little snapchat like a little screenshot of what happened at that moment in time potentially

It’s not like a live view but it’s a live moment from that stream and then from there what you would want to focus in on to help figure out which streams to watch from there is the bottom section underneath those little screenshots the text that’s in bold there that is the title

Of the stream so a lot of times you’ll find at least with the programming streams they’ll get a little bit more specific of exactly what they might be doing sure they’re doing programming what type of programming language are they doing or what what programming language are they doing

What are what type of project are they working on is it a web app is it a mobile app you know something like that they’ll usually describe that in the title and then below that the text that’s not in bold like dash ducks there on the left

Side that is the name of the channel and then below that are those tags that are associated with the the streamer stream that current session so that’s a quick overview of the signs and technology so let’s say you found a stream that you want to watch

Okay and it’s not going to be blurry like this it’s going gonna be the you know this blurred out area it’s it’s a snapshot from one of my streams it it’s gonna be this what’s happening on the screen that’s the one side the big rectangle in

The middle there and then the right hand side is the chat the chat room which speaking of i need to get the chat up for the stream how dare i um the chat room is where you get a chance to engage with the streamer and other people that

Are in the community that are watching the stream so you can have conversations help each other out learn from each other you can help out the streamer the streamer can answer your questions this is where all that interaction that community building happens is in the chat room so

Shout out to the chat over there on twitch microsoft developer i see chris jones messing around folks thank you for being here thank you for tuning in so that is what twitch looks like for you that uh those of you that may not be familiar with it haven’t checked it out yet

Moving on why does brian care i’m brian by the way uh why do i care um i was gonna share like a story about well i guess i’ll really quickly a story about why i got involved with twitch streaming uh i joined this team i didn’t really

Know my place i didn’t i felt like uh imposter syndrome which was talked about like i felt everybody around me was these like amazing they are amazing people not what were they are amazing people and how do i bring value to this team i’m i’m not trying to like do what they’re

Doing but like how do i as brian bring value to this team and i’m struggling with that i was getting kind of depressed about it and then i was like you know what i’m going to try out experimenting connecting with developers on different platforms like instagram like twitch

Because a lot of us were focusing on twitter it tends to be the place that people focus when it comes to development is twitter being the platform there’s that’s true like there’s a lot of developers on there i was like let me try something different and when i started streaming on twitch i

Just felt this sense of being a part of something i i just got lifted up and the community was just really warm and like welcoming and just supportive and that’s that’s my big reason why i still stream week in and week out and so that’s my reasoning and i feel

Like the reason i talk about this is because i feel that others can get value out of this whether you’re a viewer of a stream or you stream yourself or both i think you can get that same value that’s kind of what i’m hoping to instill through this talk today

So let’s now talk about there’s that two roles i kind of mentioned there right there’s a viewer and there’s the streamer now you can take on one or both of those roles if you’d like let’s talk about each individual one a little bit more to understand what’s the benefits and uh you know

Reasons why you might care as a viewer and through this i’m going to draw parallels since twitch is very much known for gaming and streaming games i’m going to draw parallels from the gaming side of things to the programming side when it comes to streaming that type of content that type of content

So the first one is exploring and discovering things um what i mean by this like the value of of this live streaming platform and being able to explore and discover content is well i really go back to the story with gaming when i was when i was younger

I never thought uh when i was younger i never really liked watching a friend play a video game like you’d be at their house and they might be it’s a single-player game and i’d just be frustrated just like i want to try i want to try

Um and i was like when twitch came up and i heard about that i was like why the heck would i ever watch somebody else play a video game and then i realized well one of the reasons or the value you can get out of it that i found

I could get out of it is maybe uh i don’t want it you know when i’m looking into getting a new game especially at that point in time everything was 60 bucks so that was quite the invest that is quite the event investment to drop 60 bucks on a game but you’re

Not fully sure if you’re gonna like it or not so with watching somebody play the game that allows me to explore new games discover new games that i might like and it’d be worth investing my hard-earned money in so that’s with gaming the parallel there with programming is you’re thinking about hey what

Programming language should i learn which programming language seems interesting will work well will resonate with me well you can start watching folks that are streaming python that are streaming javascript they’re streaming c sharp you can learn whether or not it’s something that you want to invest your time in if you’re understanding

More easily somebody that’s streaming c sharp versus somebody that’s streaming you know cold fusion or something i don’t know so that’s to me one of the benefits as a viewer is you can figure out what you might like what might be your interest from there we’re talking about

Learning and getting better as a value as a viewer so going back to the gaming situation let’s say you know you like a game and your skills there have kind of plateaued you want to get better and you’re struggling to do that on your own what do you do well you can watch

Somebody especially in the gaming side of things there’s people that are getting paid they make careers out of playing video games and they play for hours on end and get better and know the ins and outs of these games and they stream it so you can watch them

And learn about the little tips and tricks and strategies and tactics that they use and apply it to your own and start leveling yourself up leveling your skills up in that game the same can be applied to programming as well so maybe you did decide that you want to go with c sharp

You’re still struggling to gather the concept of like inheritance or something like that within c sharp well watch some folks that are doing c sharp that are using inheritance and applying it to their projects and that will maybe make it click for you you can level up your skills in that way

Those are two options there or two possible benefits i see as for viewers and why they would care the other thing is real life real-time interaction now i don’t have a gaming i mean it applies to gaming as well but specifically to programming here when it comes to learning new things in

This industry we tend to lean on courses tutorials instructor-led classroom type things and those are all great and well and specifically when it comes to like the tutorials and courses or the videos online it’s kind of like they go from a to b everything just works and rainbows and

Butterflies right but when you go to try it you stumble there’s some hurdles there’s some things that maybe you missed that you forgot and you got to go back and watch and it doesn’t always go as planned as it did for the instructor in the video when it comes to live streaming like

This you can see the behind the scenes the raw experience of working through projects and working through learning something in real time and you can see with that you know you can get that real experience the more real life experience so to me it’s supplemental it’s not saying the tutorials and courses

Don’t bring value they absolutely do i just believe it’s supplemental maybe for some people it might be the primary and better way for some folks because everybody learns a bit differently it might be the best way for you to learn so that’s one of the benefits there as a

Viewer is you can you can get that real time and on top of it you get the opportunity to interact with the person that’s learning this or maybe teaching it and sharing their knowledge with you if something doesn’t click for you you don’t quite understand it

You can say hey hey in the chat you know i appreciate you talking about this but i didn’t quite understand that part did you kind of go elaborate on that a bit more and then a lot of times because of how nice the community really is and the streamers here on twitch

Um they’ll pause they’ll stop what they’re doing and they’ll try and help you out and show you and explain that a bit further and last but not least that the community and social aspect when it comes to live streaming because it’s in the moment people are coming together

Albeit virtually you know it still feels like you’re there you feel like you’re a part of something you feel like you’re part of the team and it’s just it’s just a nice human interaction human feeling thing that i i personally find to be quite valuable and beneficial

As a viewer and as a streamer too honestly which leads me into the next part as a streamer role why would a streamer care why do you want to stream really quick going through these you get a chance to reach new audiences right some some folks may not be on

Twitter some folks may not be on instagram or whatever it may be right they they may be tuning into twitch for their stuff the type of things that they do more leisurely um you get stronger engagement i feel right in terms of like having that real time feedback

Being able to interact with people in the moment and get feedback on like hey is this working is this is this making sense what i’m talking through here and then for those of you that are interested in doing more presentations getting getting prepared for talks constantly doing this constantly streaming is

Building up that resilience to you know work out the butterflies i mean to be honest i still get them uh work out those butterflies before doing a talk and um you know just get you better prepared get you more practical experience doing that without having to necessarily especially during the current times

Without having to go in person and talk in front of a group of people you know physically being there all right so how all right i kind of convinced you uh you know maybe to get started streaming and you’re wondering how do i get started well we have a community driven document

Guidance that we started creating up on github so if you go to this link go to ak dot ms clark yo stream guide you’ll be able to check it out it’s it’s rough right now to be honest with you all and it’s been a little while since i’ve

I’ve you know tended to that repository but the value is still there in terms of what documents have been written up in the guidance that we have there and we can evolve and if you have input i invite you all especially in the chat those of you that are interested

To contribute if you’d like and add your thoughts and ideas and questions you might have that we can answer as part of that guide so check that out if you’d like but we’re not done so let’s say you’ve you’ve committed to yourself you’re like you know what i’m gonna give this a go

I’m gonna try this thank you brian this is wonderful what advice would you give me to somebody new getting started with streaming i got you covered don’t worry first of all i would say try your best to work towards a consistent schedule now i know everybody’s schedules are probably all over the

Place and you got a lot going on that’s why i say try your best to work towards a consistent schedule and the reason i suggest that is because when you think about like a typical tv show you know xyz show is going to be on tuesday nights at 9pm eastern or something like

That right and so the folks that enjoy that show can carve out time in their day to make sure they can be there to watch that and that’s the idea here if you want that you know the more consistent you are the more likely folks will be able

To plan ahead to be there and join you for that stream in addition to that i would say keep it simple don’t worry about getting all the bells and whistles getting the fancy microphone lights and cameras and all that stuff because one it’s quite the investment and two you’re not you don’t

You know you’re just getting started you don’t know if you’re going to really want to keep up with it or if you like it and that’s okay if you don’t like it you know it is what it is maybe maybe posting doing blog posts or something like that to keep yourself accountable

And document your journey might be the way to go twitch is just one way live streaming in general is just one way to potentially do that so keep it simple and i’m going to show right after this slide what my first stream ever looked like so you can

Understand and get get an understanding what i mean by that keep it simple don’t worry about all getting all the bells and whistles with hardware and devices for streaming and keep it real just be yourself be genuine um don’t worry about having to impress anybody or just like because people will get us

People will feel that even though it’s virtually done they’ll feel whether you’re just kind of putting on show kind of thing and whether you’re being real you’re being true to yourself kind of thing um and that’s what what’s going to cause people to connect with you or not i think too is how

Just genuine you you are with yourself and with your audience that you have and then don’t over plan and the idea i mean with that is i’ve seen folks um go the route of basically treating live streaming like you’re doing a conference talk which is fine i think it’s good but i

Don’t know that that is sustainable i don’t believe that that is sustainable and that’s why i say don’t worry about over planning it um i i think having a general goal in mind maybe some outline you want to try and follow for a stream is is good and all

Um but to be honest with you maybe this is good maybe this is bad i don’t know there’s people seem to like it but i generally wing it i just have an idea of what i want to try and do i want to add a feature to my

Project or i just want to talk through something and if i get through that good if i don’t as long as i made some progress towards it that’s kind of how i approach each stream but at least some of my streams um so that’s that’s the advice i have

For you all with that that want to get started with twit with twitch and then here’s that example i was telling you about with my first stream so you can see i just took like my built-in webcam to like the laptop i had um i just plugged that camera into the

Corner and then i shared my screen and i used the microphone on my lap like built-in laptop microphone and i just click let’s go right and then in terms of what to stream i didn’t know at the time i had no idea what what to stream i

Didn’t have a project or anything like that thought up and i was like you know what i know about all these code challenge websites that can just help me practice my skills with my programming skills so let me dive into one of these this one in particular is called old

Called i don’t know why i was fumbling on that it’s called codewars.com for those of you in chat that might have heard of it let me know let me know but there’s a bunch of them out there that you can you can check out um so yeah so that was like what i

Decided to do i was saturday nights and and off off we went this was back in january 2018 i want to say um and you can see like i wasn’t looking at the camera right now i’m looking i’m looking i’m looking into your soul right now

Right that’s what you got to do when you’re on camera no i’m just kidding you just look at the camera engage with the people that are kind enough to spend time out of their day to join you in the stream and join you this conference talk too so

Thank you everybody in the chat by the way seth and donna we we i love the name twitch links i think i might steal that because typically the way we you know i’ve always at least the twitch culture the way we address chat is we we call

Chat chat say hey chat how you doing chat what’s going on chat that kind of thing but now i kind of want to hey what’s up twitchlings but yeah thank you for that don and seth appreciate it all right so what do you need to get started streaming well you kind of need

A decent internet connection in particular upload speeds has to be fairly decent i i typically recommend about five megabits per second megabits per pixel per second per pixel why do i want to say pixel it’s late here in the evening on the east coast where i’m at and i’m

Stumbling i’m struggling so stick with me folks all right i’m sorry five megabits per second upload speed is kind of what what i would hope you you know if you can get that but i’ve heard of people being able to stream with less uh a computer

Duh right brian uh a microphone a camera optional if you don’t feel comfortable being on camera that’s fine i’ve seen people have success without a camera it you know i just feel that a camera is an added benefit it creates a more um connection with the folks that are viewing your stream

And they put it’s a it’s a face to the voice you know and uh yeah that’s that’s kind of why i suggest that but you don’t necessarily need it and then broadcasting software the the de facto one that’s free and open source is called open broadcaster software

Or obs for short that thing can be quite cumbersome there’s lots of other tools out there like one is stream yard um there’s restream there’s a bunch of them out there if you you know if you need some help that streaming guide that and they’ll have the link again at the end

Will help you get squared away with doing that and then just streaming figuring out something you enjoy so if you you know you’re looking to learn javascript and you just want to do some code challenges with that try that out that’s a good way to get started or

Even like preparing talks or something like that whatever you feel you enjoy doing it doesn’t necessarily have to be programming give it a shot try streaming it what now keep in mind uh who’s this for who who are you gonna be streaming for or who’s who should stream some people might

Think well you have to be a senior dev and have you know 10x in your title 10x developer in your title or something like that no it’s a bunch of bunch of junk uh it’s i think i’d really believe anybody regardless of experience level should give it a shot um

For one of the reasons let’s take it this way maybe you’re new you’re getting folks here in this conference you’re new to streaming um one of the way i really feel that you bring like i was saying earlier in the conference you bring a new perspective to learning stuff when it tends to

Happen with folks that have several years of experience in the industry we take for granted the things that we have learned it’s called sometimes referred to as the curse of knowledge and forget that that’s something that you know even though it comes so natural to us now it’s not actually that natural we

Struggled with that at one point in time and we need that reminder and it’s helpful to see that right whether you’re a senior more senior experienced of a senior experience developer or you’re just a fellow you know newbie to programming right everybody can learn from each other i really believe that

And so this is not necessarily just senior devs experienced devs that should be streaming i think people that are new and wanting to document their journey and you know doing that and connecting with the community to help you and support you through that journey this is a great great thing for you as

Well um know your audi you know get to know your audience uh keep that in mind keep them engaged into it don’t just you know sometimes we get into a train of thought and you’re gonna keep streaming and working on that but then make sure you check back in with the chat

And then beyond that listen for feedback the chat is the community is fantastic with this they’ll be like hey you know your audio is off it’s not sounding good or we couldn’t actually see that because your camera was blocking it or whatever you know things like that whether it’s production

Related or programming related listen for that feedback use that to help iterate on your stream and become better and improve and that’s it folks that’s that’s all i wrote there’s that link again aka dot ms slash clarkio stream guide it’s a github repository and it should help you out with getting started

If you have any questions i’ll be hanging out in the chat for a little bit longer i know i didn’t get a chance to really you know answer the folks that were in there as the session was going on but i’ll be sure to catch back up anybody that

Tagged me just do at clark you own the chat and i’ll be sure to check it out all right thank you all have a good rest of the conference back on over to seth and donna