The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Live coding open source on Twitch (Interview)

Episode Date: March 16, 2018

Suz Hinton joined the show to talk about live coding open source on Twitch. We talk about how she got interested in Twitch, her goals and aspirations for live streaming, the work she's doing in open source, Twitch for open source, how you and others can get started — and maybe some other fun stuff we have in the works at Changelog.

Bandwidth for ChangeLog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. Error monitoring is by Rollbar. Check them out at Rollbar.com. And we're hosted on Linode servers. Head to Linode.com slash ChangeLog. This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is a cloud computing platform built with simplicity at the forefront,

so managing infrastructure is easy. Whether you're a business running one single virtual machine or 10,000, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so teams can build, deploy, and scale cloud apps faster and more efficiently. Join the ranks of Docker, GitLab, Slack, HashiCorp, WeWork, Fastly, and more. Enjoy simple, predictable pricing. Sign up to deploy your app in seconds. Head to do.co slash changelog and

our listeners get a free 100 credit to spend in your first 60 days try it free once again head to do.co slash changelog welcome back everybody this is the changelog a podcast featuring the hackers Welcome back, everybody. This is the ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, leaders, and innovators of open source. I'm Adam Stachowiak, editor-in-chief of ChangeLog. On today's show, Jared and I are talking to Suze Hinton about live coding on Twitch, streaming, live streaming, whatever you want to call it. We call it streaming here. Open source is fun.

It's way more fun when you can do it live like Suze does. We talk about how she got interested in Twitch, what her goals are, her aspirations, the kind of work she's doing in open source, Twitch for open source, how you and others might be able to get started, and maybe some fun stuff we have in the works. So, Suze, we would like to learn the ins and outs of open source live streaming and who else to go to than Suze Hinton, who

has been doing it for a very long time and written some very nice Medium posts and LinkedIn tutorials all about the ins and outs of Twitch. So, Suze, where do we start with you and Twitch? Yeah, this could be a good direction for the change log, I think. What if you had like a video that shows you actually recording it and things like that?

We actually were discussing that pre-call and just trying to think, you know, when a new up and coming platform and we realized Twitch is not new, it's kind of new for open source and live coding. But when a platform comes out and people are using it and there's lots of interesting kind of new use cases for media production, Adam and I are always talking about, yeah, what would the changelog look like on this platform? And we're kind of discussing what might be interesting. One thought that Adam, you had was maybe you could live stream while you're doing the edits and talk through the decision making process. But we don't know. We don't know what's compelling on Twitch. I think that would actually be really interesting. Most people want a behind the scenes of what you're actually doing. And I think that's what the main appeal has been for especially open source live coding.

Yeah, especially I think, you know, I don't want to take the limelight here, but on the audio editing portion of it, like a lot of people think it's hard. And what I've learned over years of experience is that it is hard until you simplify it. And there's like three or four main kind of effects or plugins I might use that pretty much help us get to production audio and it they're not hard to use and just with a little instruction and you know some experience of like here's what you should listen for they're pretty easy for pretty much anybody to implement so it's not like I'm I didn't go to school for an audio degree I

I just winged it really hard for several years and I got bloody knuckles and here we are. You know, like I learned by doing very much. Like started out with a garage band and, you know, just graduated through different digital audio workstations called DAWs. And now we use Adobe Audition and, you know, life is grand. But like, yeah, I think that's a really interesting perspective of the behind the scenes and not feeling like you have to overproduce it because that's the thing that trips most people up is feeling like it has to be overly produced

or intros and outros. And it's just like, just give me the real deal. Be real with me, be personal. So thinking about the inner process versus kind of the the end product we're all used to delivering an end product whether it's an mp3 or it's a piece of software or a video and um that's very mysterious to people who aren't good at delivering those things but to people who do that a lot like you you said, Adam, there's nothing to you. There's nothing special about editing anymore.

There's not any magic there. And the thing about a magician is, is once you know his tricks, like the tricks aren't very impressive anymore. So I feel like a lot of the, and Suze, you can speak to this because you've been live streaming, you know, your open source work for over, for a year and some, and some now is, is there a, a losing of that missteer potentially, or does it actually perhaps work in the other direction? I feel like it works in the other direction.

Obviously, I didn't go to Twitch College or live streaming college. This is not really like an open source school. There are people in the community that are very happy to help you get started with this kind of stuff. But I think that for me, if you have trouble with the deliverables, with something like live streaming, if you just show up, like it's like maybe giving a quick performance or giving a presentation at work or something. If you show up and you do it, the deliverable is actually happening while you're producing it, if that makes sense, which is different to what you're doing with the changelog podcast, for example.

Right. Yeah. We used to do, we've done a couple of these shows live. And in those cases, the live version and the produced version was very close, except for maybe a slight bit of edit just to sort of make it more listenable after the fact. Like when you listen live, you forgive. listen recorded you're like you could have edited that you know or we might tweak a little bit so that's the difference like we have done this show live we've we actually have a couple shows that are live and then get produced and some people show up and they like the live version better because they feel like it's like they're there they're raw and uncut yeah yeah raw and uncut.

Whereas produced, the edited version, it's like, well, you could have made that better, so glad you did. Yeah, I've tried to edit. I think I did the first four of my live streams. I did treat them like that kind of scenario where I thought, well, I put all this effort into going through that entire process. I should really just spend another couple of hours on top of that, like exporting it as a heavily edited video so that people can get some reuse out of it. And

then I quickly stopped because as we all know, editing is the longest part of actually producing these things, not the actual recording part. So yeah, I learned my lesson very quickly there to just let it be transient. Yeah, the edits, like if you have an hour's worth of content, it could take you three times as long as the content itself. Just listening, editing, playing it back, listening, editing, playing it back, and then making any sort of editorial decisions if that's what you're trying to do.

Right. It can get infinitely more complex as you add more and more production value to it. So, but at a minimum, you're looking at least real time. You know, you're going to want to listen to it. So it's going to take at least the length of the content. Exactly.

Some of these live streams are very long as well. So I think a lot of that decision-making process, like do I polish this up and produce a beautiful object or is the process part of the product? Like you're saying with Twitch, it goes back to your goals. And so part of what I'm curious about, Suze, is first of all, how you got interested in Twitch and live streaming your coding. And then what were your goals back then and whether they've changed over time with doing

it every week? Yeah, that's a great question. I think what it started for with me was that I worked on a lot of open source hardware related libraries, and there were also JavaScript. And so it was a little bit of a weird niche. And then on top of that, the general JavaScript community tends to feel kind of intimidated by working on hardware related things. And so it was a fairly lonely experience for me. I was completely okay with the fact that I was one of the only collaborators on most of my libraries. But I

also just felt that there was no need for people to feel intimidated like that. And it was hard for me to learn from other open source maintainers, given that I didn't really have any other collaborators to work with as well. And so I ended up watching Nolan Lawson's live stream that he did on YouTube about maybe almost two years ago now. And he was just showing an entire process of what it's like to be a maintainer of something super duper popular. So I think he was going through like his patch DB repo. He was triaging tickets. He was pulling down branches and trying to reproduce bugs and things like that. And he went for three whole hours.

And it kind of showed that even in three hours of time, you don't necessarily get a lot of code written. You don't necessarily become super productive. But you just sort of start wading through the thicket of open source things that you have to do on a regular basis. So I found it really, really insightful. And I wondered whether people would get the same benefit from seeing how different my open source sort of little world was compared to someone who maintains really popular stuff. And I was hoping that that would make open source more approachable for people where it doesn't matter if you don't have 100,000 people using your stuff, like you can still get a lot of enjoyment out of doing that.

I think people forget the point of open source isn't exactly to be the most popular project. That's the worst case. The point of open source is to be a useful utility to society. Yes. And oftentimes just for yourself, right? That's where a lot of it starts. It's like scratch my itch and then... Share it so others can grows from grows from there yeah but yeah definitely in

this day and age i think you know popularity is is a is a metric that we all and all the time but in open source now more than ever it's been uh it's definitely changed quite a bit over the last several years just the way that the industry is that open source is one and the way the industry treats open source, then it's significantly changed in its perception to like the reasons why people do it. Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to sort of give people a fly on the wall view of what it's actually like so that they can make the decision about whether or not it would be a cool thing that they would want to do. Please do because I'm thinking that myself. Yeah. So that's sort of why I started doing it was to give people that little fly on the world view. But then it evolved beyond that where what I didn't expect was that I would have this regular super positive community coming back every single week and then they would start pull requesting me and helping me think of different ways to solve problems

and just overall becoming a super positive influence in my open source life, I guess. And that was really, really surprising to me. That's definitely made my work much more motivating for me to work on. So I watched a recent stream of yours. Actually, I think it was just last Sunday, perhaps. And you now have a huge community around you and a bunch of people in the chat room and subscribers. And there's like a thriving little ecosystem around your channel.

Can you tell us how that's grown and some of your keys to building that up over the last couple of years? Totally. I think when I first started streaming, I had like four people. And then the next week I had nine people. And then it stayed pretty low for a while and people were kind of shy to ask questions. But I think that at least for the first six months to a year, I was trying to choose things that were engaging for people that they'd never seen before. And that's sort of where I started watching the growth because people really loved watching somebody work on something other than what they do in their regular day jobs. And so, of course, that hardware, the Arduino stuff was obviously really appealing to people. So that's sort of where I started growing my audience because it was a really good way for them to learn how to

get started, but also just watch somebody doing something really fun. There's something, I guess, vicarious about doing that. And then I'm not sure how, but because I'm still very puzzled as to why people watch me specifically, but that's just grown and grown and grown. And so I think when I wrote a blog post about my experience of doing it for a year, I released that in July. I actually went back and read that post just yesterday and it says, oh yeah, I have about a thousand followers now and it's great. And I now have 6,000 and it's only been about seven months since then. So it's just gobsmacking how that actually happened so quickly over the last six months, I'd say. A snowball effect.

Yeah, I think so. I think there's been a few retweets from people like Scott Hanselman and Swift on Security. And that tends to drive a lot of audiences. And then I do tend to retain a small percentage of them once they've checked out my stream. Well, I'll say that that post, I think it was also instrumental because, as I said, Twitch as a platform for open source live streaming is a newer thing. And there, like you said, Nolan Lawson was a bit of inspiration to you. And this post, I've seen multiple people, which we'll link it up in our show notes. As Sue says, called lessons for my first year of live coding on Twitch which she published on free code camps medium last July has been cited I've seen it cited multiple places I know we put it in our newsletter back

then and people are using that as kind of a their Twitch live streaming bible so to speak to starting place yeah to either inspire them to do it or to even just see the technical bits and bobs you got to piece together in order to have a good live stream. So you probably got a bunch of people watching you to see how you do it because maybe they want to emulate that success. Yeah, I think so. I definitely wasn't the first to live stream code at all. And I think, you know, I started streaming maybe at least a couple of years after the first round of people started doing it. But I think the difference with me was I sort of came up for air and reached out to people and broke through that fourth wall of,

oh, and this is actually, that's been my experience with it. And here's how to actually get started if you want to do it, rather than just being one of the select few that starts doing it and keeps doing it. Where does this fit in in terms of, because I don't know you that well, I've just met you today. I'm a fan of what you've done over the years, but do you have a full-time job? Is this something you're pursuing doing full-time? How does that fit into your motivation for doing this? That's a really great question. So when I first started streaming, I was a full-time front end developer at Kickstarter, which is the crowdfunding platform. And I was doing quite a bit of open source and also public

speaking and just side projects outside of that. Because, because I, you know, obviously had pursuits that were different to just what I wanted to do in my day job. And so this literally just started as another silly hobby that you just sort of try out and you see if it sticks. And so what's interesting about that is I always kept it extremely separate. Um, you know, I have my streams held every Sunday, so that's not a work day for me. So I'm very strict about trying to keep just personal projects for Sunday to set a good example to people to not work on the weekend, if possible. Well, at least on your day job material. And from there, it actually caught the attention of Microsoft, which is where I work now. And my stream definitely made me stand out

from a lot of other prominent programmers in the community, and especially within roles such as dev relations, dev advocacy. So that's what I'm doing at Microsoft now. And it was a big reason why they noticed me and they reached out to me saying, hey, you can keep your stream on Sundays, like it's totally chill, but we can see that you're quite skilled at reaching other developers. So would you consider moving into dev relations as a full-time job, given that we can see already from your Twitch stream that you're great at talking to other people? So they didn't make it a requirement for me to stream, you know, Microsoft related streams, but it was great that that's what got me noticed in the first place.

It's interesting that it's, you know, that's a pathway to future employment. And anything you do like that, that's that helps you stand out, you know, is certainly going to have an effect on future employment or future opportunities. And that's just interesting that they directly, like, it's not even like just part of your, you know, resume that they liked. It was like the thing that got you noticed, you know, to stand out. Yeah, I actually think it's quite hilarious that it happened that way because the biggest fear I had about getting started with streaming was, okay, well, everyone kind of barrels through something they don't know how to do. And they tend to do that in privacy. And most people only push up their

very polished commit, even in the workplace. And a lot of people are quite intimidated about pairing with more senior developers, because they're worried about their reputation and being found out to be imposters and all that kind of self-esteem stuff that, you know, it's very hard to separate yourself from your code. Right. And so I thought that if I stream myself, which I always joke that you are at least like at most your 50 percent of the programmer you actually are when you're not under pressure, having, you know, a couple of hundred people watching you code. And so I even feel like on Twitch, I'm not actually representing the best programmer that I can possibly be.

I'm actually representing a much worse programmer than I am. And so I actually thought that if I start streaming and people find out and they assume that this is the best that I can do, maybe this will actually make me unhirable instead. So I think it's really, really funny that Microsoft reached out because I was like, are you sure? Because there's a lot of crap that I've written on this show, you know?

Right. That's hilarious. That is hilarious. To show some similarities, an inner tagline for this shows that we um we face our imposter syndrome so you don't have to and the you is the audience listening and so rewind less than five minutes ago i'm like i don't really know you well i could have easily looked up your bio and said hey she works at microsoft i could have looked that up but i I hadn't done that yet. So that's just one area where like, yeah, well, we own the fact that, you know, I'm being real, you know, I wanted to ask her, what do you do? How does this affect your employment? And I could have looked it up, but I didn't. You're never going to get a job in podcasting again, Adam. You just ruined it.

There you go. I was so close, so close to being a pro. No, I'm really glad you asked because I really did think that this would affect my job prospects by doing this. And so it's had the opposite effect, which is really, really cool. And in my current job, they've basically said that if you wanted to do some streams to do with Azure, which is what I do a lot of dev relations around. I'm trying to make it easier for the developer community to use Azure services, particularly IoT. And I have actually run some streams during work hours, which feels so weird to me because I'm like, this seems like I'm having too much fun

during work hours, you know what I mean? That's really cool, though. It's really interesting, too, to take a hobby and mash it with, I guess, legit work, so to speak. To not just be fun things, but also to be something that you do. And I find that like this, the world we live in today, I was just telling this to somebody who's, you know, like newer into somebody who's 21 basically. And I was like, you know what?

I'm 38. So I had some years on this person and I was saying that, you know, in my, it feels so weird even saying this, Jared, I'm sorry, but in my day. Oh, no. In my day, like, we didn't have permission to just publish our ideas, right? We had to get a printing thing or something like that. Like, we didn't have the internet. Like, it is so ubiquitous today. And I was just telling this person, like, the internet, if you don't understand this like this, it's a free printing press.

You can, without any hesitation, you can liberally just publish your ideas where that's been never done before in history. Now it's there. And we didn't have that when I was younger. You had to ask permission, and now you don't have to ask permission anymore. You have permission. Unless you publish your ideas on other people's platforms, and then you can definitely be censored as we're finding out issues around that stuff. It's happening, but yeah, absolutely.

I have a funny story about that. When I first entered the Node.js ecosystem and saw NPM, the package manager, I actually asked, oh, you know, who do you ask for permission to publish like a library? Like how do you get somebody to review your library to see if it's good enough to be on NPM? And people just laughed at me. They're like, you just publish it. You just push it. And I was was like what does that even mean because I'm so even though I grew up um basically having access to the internet maybe shortly after I was a teenager I still felt that there were just certain parts where you had to like prove yourself first or you had to be good enough in order to be able to publish this episode is brought to you by gliffy gliffy is the easiest way to visualize any idea

use gliffy to diagram UML diagrams, flow charts, or charts, wire frames, and more. And in this segment, I'm talking with Mike Sample, a fellow listener of this podcast, as well as the engineering manager at Gliffy, who leads their drawing platform team. And I asked Mike why he thinks Gliffy is an important tool for developers.

Why I think Gliffy is important. I've been involved in a tremendous number of development projects. And invariably, you know, that process involves a lot of the front loading of imagining what a complex enterprise software system looks like. You're dealing with a lot of people, you have a limited amount of time to ship product, both the product is complex, the process is complex, and most importantly, the communication is very complex. And what I found with Gliffy and what others have found is here's a tool to visually represent very complex processes in a way that everyone can

immediately kind of coalesce around. It provides this kind of common visual language for understanding really difficult topics and getting everybody on board so that they can see the road ahead. I agree. Being able to communicate visually and having this visual artifact to instantiate new ideas as well as document a source of truth so that whenever you need to go back to a workflow or something you haven't touched in a while, it's that source of truth for you. So tell me this, Michael, who's using this tool? This is not a novel observation. I'm not the only one who uses this.

It's a very easy tool to use. Four and a half million people use this tool for all variety of purposes for creating org charts and flow charts and UML diagrams and floor plans, et cetera, on and on. I use it with my own team. Whenever I've worked on any large enterprise software project, I always spend a little time kind of charting things out. Sometimes

that's a pen and a napkin. You know, before I knew about Gliffy, now it's Gliffy. And it's easy to use. It's on a web page. You know, I don't have to download software. I don't have to, you know, learn some complex interaction in terms of manipulating shapes. It's just drag, drop, attach, move, label. It's very, very simple. And it's extremely powerful in terms of getting everyone to understand something at a very high level. All right, it's easy to get started. Try it free in Atlassian, inside Confluence or Jira or online at gliffy.com slash changelog. And as a special bonus, our listeners get 25% off one year of Gliffy and Confluence or Jira. And to get started or to find those details,

it's all at gliffy.com slash changelog. so since we were talking about imposter syndrome and how we face it on this show usually talking to people we look up to like yourself so other people can just wait in the wings and watch and very much i think live streaming adam it might be the ultimate punch in your imposter syndrome right in the face it's like i'm just gonna code right in front of anybody who wants to watch and I'm wondering if there was like a any leaps you had to take to get going or maybe even anything you could say to somebody who's considering it but they're just feeling like maybe like we do sometimes that I'm not interesting my coding sucks what have? Did you have to convince yourself to it? And do you like to convince other people that it's worth a try?

Yeah, I definitely deliberated for more weeks than I should have. And I find that that's what people tell me when they say it. They're like, yeah, I bought the microphone. I set up VBS and I have the project I want to work on. And then I just keep saying, maybe tomorrow I'll feel ready to do it. And you're never going to feel ready. It's exactly the same as when you're getting up to give a talk in front of an audience. You know, you can't just say, oh, can I just do it tomorrow instead? Right. It's like, no, everyone's actually here. So you should just do it. And so given that I have public speaking experience, I tried to think of it that way, as in like, once you get into it, once you hit record, and you get over

those first terrifying five minutes, you'll get into a groove. But I still felt that similar to public speaking, I had to over prepare beforehand. So for the first four streams, I actually did end up practicing the feature I was going to develop or just seeing whether I was going to hit any gotchas or whether I was going to have to look up anything in documentation. And I basically rehearsed it and then saved that code into like a different branch in my repo and then sort of studied it in the morning before turning the stream on. So I would say that that's kind of the cheaty way to do it because sometimes that can come out as very forced, but you know, you're still going to forget a few things, even if you think you know how to actually do it. So it should come out pretty natural. Once you've done that a couple of times, you'll realize that, oh, this is way too much work for me to prepare beforehand. And I'm actually feeling like I sort of,

I sort of feel much more comfortable just winging it. And that's when you'll really start coming into your own with streaming. And so that's been my personal experience. I'm not actively discouraging people from rehearsing for the first few, because that absolutely helped me build that confidence to finally hit that start streaming button. Good, good advice.

So if you need to practice or prepare as a crutch to get started nothing wrong with that um but ultimately as you get comfortable just like it is with public speaking the more you do it the more comfortable you get or with podcasting what have you you need less and less of those of those things but if that's what you need to get started then that's what you got to do um i'm just curious so like one of the thoughts I have around live streaming is especially with my style of coding is very much me either pacing around the room thinking or like just Googling the crap out of stuff or changing my mind over and over. Is that the kind of stuff that is like totally normal and people live streaming their open

source? Or is that something that you do where you're just like going down a road and you throw it away and that's all a-okay on live streaming yeah that's totally normal and i think that normalizing that is really important because i think we all secretly have habits like this and we all think that we're the only ones who do it and that as a result we are the ones that are not the good programmer and that everyone else around us are the good programmers. Right. And so definitely feel that that's why this medium has been so important and refreshing for people. And that's why being authentic on your stream is really important. Just to give you an example, I started something that's actually still scary for me on a live stream recently. I picked a really large project

that I've been putting off for a long time. It's going to involve refactoring three different libraries that were written by three different programmers who have kind of handed the keys over to me to keep maintaining. And I was going to have to, to a degree, refactor some of my own code as well just to release what seems like a really basic feature. And I always told myself I'll find time for it eventually.

But then it became pretty apparent that the most time that I have these days is when I actually sit down to stream the work. And so there was a lot of planning involved. There was a lot of brainstorming. And so I pretty much just started letting people into that. So, you know, I would open up just my scratchpad where I keep notes and I started a new page in front of everyone. And I said, okay, here are all of the events that we want to surface through so that people can kick off basically a process with this

library and then they can receive progress events on how that task is actually going and how close that task is to completion. And I basically give them just gave them a look into how I plan out a feature and how I end up brainstorming what I need to research first. And even just dumping something on a page that's not that great, but you can kind of go from there was probably the most important thing I could have showed them much, much more than code. And as I've gone through that feature, and you probably saw that in Munich, I was incredibly jet lagged, and I was trying to get something done. But you see me go back and forth, I'll say, I think that the object signature should look like this. And then two seconds later, I'll say, Oh, but actually, what if you were in this case? Or what about this edge case? And then you see me kind of freeze for

a second. And then I realized that to keep moving, you just have to make a decision and make something that you can change later on. And so it's definitely made me a better programmer in the sense that when the heat is on you, when everyone's watching, when you want to stay productive, you actually become much more accepting of just get something down and then you will then discover what needs to change afterwards. And so that's been really scary for me to show a really big long-term project where I'm not actually a hundred percent sure how to solve it from beginning to end. And I think that's been really positive for people to see. Very cool. That makes me think about a theory I've been kind of mulling over recently,

which is that I think people undervalue iteration. And you see this with companies who are successful, and you're like, wow, they came out of nowhere, and it took like 10 years to get there. This sort of overnight success that took 10 years to take place.'s it's similar you know like in in this in the sense that you're talking about code well that code had to evolve from you know you walking around the room thinking about it to your first uh stab at it like i think we undervalue the the concept of iteration and the time it takes that you can't just microwave something into existence and immediately get

there that it actually takes thinking through the problem and, you know, failing a couple of times and getting to success. That iteration is a process you go through, not get to. It's so true. And this feature is the perfect example of that. You know, it was an issue raised on a GitHub repo, and it was something that I'd wanted to actually work on before somebody asked for it. And it seems so simple. It was just when this Arduino is having code uploaded to it with your tool, I want to know, I want to see a progress bar. And like, that seems so, so simple. But what was cool is I got to take the audience through, okay, well, when we talk about Arduino, we're

talking about three completely different protocols. And depending on the board you're flashing, you're going to be using one of three protocols. So that means these three separate libraries need to be emitting events. And they all kind of work in their own way. And they all have to basically emit events based on literally opening and loading pages of memory in the registers of the chip. And every time they write a page, we have to like bubble that up and somehow compute the percentage based on that. And so what starts off as, oh yeah, there should just be a progress bar, like no worries, becomes literally triple the work that somebody probably initially thought it was.

And also just like diving deeper and deeper, closer to the metal in order for that to happen. Very cool. How much of that context do you feel like you need to reiterate as you, as you start your next stream for the people who are either new or are your, do you have a core audience that's just there every single time? And so there's the context is implied. How much time do you spend kind of regrouping each time that you start a new session? That's such a great question. And it's something that I definitely try and do every single time. But the amount that you do is definitely

subjective. And so a lot of the time I am working on. So with the library I've been talking about for this podcast has been AVR Girl Arduino, and I work on that a lot. So I have a couple of chat macros where if someone wants more information, I can actually just drop a little command in and it prints out like a whole section and it links to the GitHub repo and explains briefly what it is. But I usually at least start every single project, sorry, every single stream with something like, oh, here's the library that I'm working on today. And it does X, Y, and Z. And today we're looking at this issue on GitHub here, and then I'll paste the GitHub link in the chat. And so I sort of try and set up the scene so that if someone comes in later and say, oh, what are you doing? Like my community can immediately say, oh, she's working on this issue. This library flashes boards, read the readme

and let us know if you've got any other questions. So it's sort of like prepping the preppers or teaching the teachers. It helps them to then bring other new people into the community and it means I can focus on the code. I imagine there's probably people who are even so involved that maybe they come up with better ideas or different ideas with you or for you

while you're actually trying to decide a perhaps an architecture or a route to take with certain issues is if you're found that the case that the chat room or certain contributors are actually like live coding i'm just trying to think of it like can actually feel like pair programming yeah so i think in my medium article i joke joke that I call it massively online pair programming. So, you know, like a game, but instead everyone's sort of mob programming with each other. And so it's definitely that.

So I get everything from people pointing out typos, which is like pretty high level, to someone sending me a pastebin saying, here's the code that I think would be slightly better and here is the code that you know sometimes I'll talk back and forth with people in chat and I just because I'm I've got my mind on a hundred different parts of the stream and also the code I don't quite get what they're saying so they're very patient and they'll send me a github or something that explains what they were thinking. And that's actually really super, super helpful.

And there have been times where I've sort of felt myself going on a tangent. So I've just immediately crossed over, opened a GitHub issue, said, you're all free to take it if you really want it. And by the time I've ended the stream, someone's actually done that work for me. So it's also been this kind of weird thing where I can fork off that work so that I can keep away from the yak shaves. And that's been a really great way for people to collaborate with me beyond just chatting with me live. So it sounds like your style is collaborative, whereas is it normal for people using Twitch to live stream? Is it always the case where you feel like you have to interact with

those watching or is there someone who broadcasts and someone like you who interacts? I think it really depends. There are a lot of people who are just doing their homework, they're going through college and they're doing their homework. They don't have their webcam up, they just literally have their screen and they use it as a motivation. There are other people who stream every single day because they're working on, let's say, their own business or their own open source library full time. So they're not necessarily always going to address everyone in the chat because they want to stay productive and things like that. So I think there are no rules when it comes to that. But I know from experience that if you're going to stream yourself doing things, you're not

going to be doing it, you know, for eight hours a day, that it's in your best interest to build that community and to constantly interact with them. Because that's where the actual benefit is. It's doing those things together, not just having like a very static stream where it's just people may as well be watching a YouTube video. To the point you're doing it for is, is the interaction is the community, not just to say, here's me working and watch you work. Right. I mean, I know that people aren't just coming to my stream every Sunday for me. They're also coming there for each other to chat with each other. Um, we have this tradition where I will turn my stream on around 11am. I will then,

I will just put it in like a little standby screen saying that I'm coming on soon. And people get a notification that I'm streaming. And they'll just, everyone comes in and asks each other about their week. They're like, Oh, what are you working on right now? Do you have any side projects going? What did you do at work this week? Like, are there any cool things you're excited about? And so there's this really cute tradition. And then when I come in with my coffee and, you know, turn the actual real stream on, I have all these different things where I can say, oh, that sounds really cool. You know, this is what I've been up to. And so there's, there's so much more than just, oh, I'm sitting down and writing code in front of people. It becomes a family and it becomes something

extremely unique that you just don't see elsewhere. That's an interesting Twitch hack too. If I haven't investigated this further, if that's a, a Sue's only thing or not, but you know, like starting your stream before you actually start your stream, cause you leverage the platform of notifications that they have built in and

you sort of like, you know, pre-stream so to speak. I don't know how to describe it, but like, that's really interesting to, to do that, to do it like that. That way you sort of like, you know, pre-stream, so to speak. I don't know how to describe it, but like, that's really interesting to do that, to do it like that. That way you sort of have like, you know, you're pre-filling the queue, so to speak, of like interactions in the community. They get there five minutes prior to the stream starting or whatever the time frame is.

That's an interesting hack. Is that something you learned? Is that something that everybody does that maybe? It's definitely something I've learned. It gives people the opportunity to come in, get settled before I start explaining what I'm doing. So it also helps me because then I don't have to keep repeating myself. So, you know, if everyone who's probably going to join is there within the first 10 minutes,

then that's like kind of the critical mass that I'm speaking to. And then as more sort of stragglers come in, that's where the community is helping them, you know, tell them what I'm actually working on. But I think it just gives, it's kind of like when you have a user group meetup and you say, turn up at seven, but the talk starts at 7.30. It just gives everyone a chance to kind of like talk to each other, figure out what's going on, get settled settled maybe just run to the bathroom real quick you know it just gives people a chance to do that and so I totally discovered that accidentally and now it's it's at the point where this is actually quite funny um I started my stream this Sunday and I accidentally left this little query parameter on my streaming URL that I have

to stream to in order for it to show up. And it's a little test query that allows you to just see whether or not your stream is, you know, is like stable or not. So you know that you have a good quality stream. And there were crickets in the chat, like no one was there, no one was talking to each other. I came back from making my coffee and it was just completely silent. And it was so noticeable and jarring for me that I really took for granted the fact that there were people already in there and being super welcoming and saying hi. And so sure enough, I checked out my streaming URL. It was the wrong URL.

I swapped it over and then people just immediately joined the chat. And it was just really, really strange to think that I rely on that now to know that people are ready to go so you probably had like a moment of complete self-doubt or like maybe you thought the gig was up and nobody likes you anymore they found out that you're an imposter and they left she's like it was so true I was like oh that's it I guess people just don't really care about it anymore it happened very suddenly but I guess that's okay and I actually um then teased myself so when people came online I said you know what like when you all didn't show up I actually like felt kind of sad I thought that everyone just didn't find it interesting anymore and and people were super

super nice to me and I was like no no you should be teasing me about that moment that I had. This episode is brought to you by our friends at GoCD. GoCD is an open-source continuous delivery server built by ThoughtWorks. GoCD provides continuous delivery out of the box with its built-in pipelines, advanced traceability, and value stream visualization. With GoCD, you can easily model, orchestrate,

and visualize complex workflows from end to end. It supports modern infrastructure with elastic on-demand agents and cloud deployments. And their plug-in ecosystem ensures GoCD will work well in your unique environment. To learn more about GoCD, visit gocd.org slash changelog. It's free to use and has professional support for enterprise add-ons available from ThoughtWorks. Once again, gocd.org slash changelog. So Suze, when we look at the idea of of live streaming obviously it fits great for gaming because that's what twitch has been built upon and we'll touch more on whether or not twitch is

the only way you could do this but i'm curious how this affects let's say the sustainability side of open source we talk a lot about sustainable open source uh different funding models for whether you're going to fund a project or a person or all these things happening in today's world of open source i'm curious how you know specifically open source how does this fit into like let's say funding i know you have the option to subscribe to people you may not do this in particular but how does this work and is this an alternative to, Patreon or getting paid to do full-time open source? How much have you thought about doing this with Twitch? How do you think about this?

I'm really glad you brought this up because I think that we're sort of reaching that point in open source now where we realize that, yes, open source won, but it definitely came at a huge cost. And it came to a cost of people's time and labor and things like that. So on Patreon, there are a lot of open source developers, and I do actually support quite a few of them for stuff that I do use, but also stuff that I just think is good that it's out in the world, even if I don't use their code. And I know that open source developers are constantly looking for other ways to kind of supplement their income so that they can continue doing this and so I know that Patreon is a big one because it's a subscription model so it's a set and forget source of income which is great for

people to be able to do that I know that with YouTube some people try to create video tutorials on the side that generate a lot of views. And so they can get ad revenue from that. And I definitely feel that Twitch falls into a very similar vein to those two money sort of generating avenues. I think with Twitch, it's particularly good because it sort of rolls everything together. And so let's say somebody supports you on Patreon. There are actually webhooks you can use that announce that on the stream.

And so if someone subscribes to you on Twitch, for example, or if they donate money on PayPal to you, or if they sign up for your Patreon, or if they support your Kickstarter, for example, there's webhooks that allow you to be able to announce and celebrate that on the screen. And so people get a much bigger reward than just knowing they did a nice thing. They actually get acknowledged on air, which is a big part of the appeal of Twitch, where you actually get to live interact with somebody. And so I think it could be a really effective way of doing it. I think with open source, it can be really helpful not just to bring in money, but just to find people to help you do that work as well, as we discussed before.

And so I think that if you show the work you're doing, if you show people just how involved it can be to maintain just one library, it can really help people understand the value of what you're providing. It can make you much more human, much more sort of relatable, and people will obviously have a lot more empathy for what you're actually trying to achieve. And so I think that Patreon does that to a degree where you can write personal posts to people and send them certain rewards for supporting you. And I think that Twitch is an excellent supplement for that rather than just a drop in replacement.

It's like, I don't really feel like you have to choose one or the other. I was just curious, like, because I don't think subscribes are visible to the public. I think they're only to you as the publisher, right? Like if we can maybe break down some of the mechanics, so to speak, you've got follows, which is like any social platform, it's free. And then you have the option to subscribe to somebody, which I believe you can give somebody a free subscribe, which I'm not really clear what that means, but then you can also choose to subscribe at a, at the base rate or these higher rates. There's like three different tiers, but I think they all do the same thing.

And then you have this concept of a bit, which seems to be either custom art or purchased art that I think just jumps into the stream as like somebody gives you essentially money as an artistic object that shows up in your stream. Did I kind of break those down well? Is that a good assumption of how those things work? Yeah, that's pretty spot on. So the followers are just really showing that you want to know when that person's streaming again, and it's just showing that you like their stream.

Subscribing is three tiers, like you said. And a lot of creators on Twitch, they will set certain tiers where the higher you subscribe, the more perks you get. So it can be very similar to Patreon in that model, where maybe every six months you send people who pledge to the high tier on Twitch, you might send them a personalized postcard or a thank you. And there's a concept known as custom emotes as well, where you get to use this special emote that's only for the mid tier or the high tier pledging, for example. So there's definitely little perks you can offer. The bits are actually like no strings attached. So you don't necessarily have to like offer anything in return. But they're a currency, I guess, on Twitch.

So I think one bit is worth one penny and most people tier like a couple of hundred bits at a time, which ends up being a couple of dollars. And it's just an easy way for them to donate to you. But also because Twitch integrates so well with bits because it's their own currency, you get a very obvious acknowledgement that you've actually

supported that person too. So it's almost like a gamification of supporting somebody. There's something in it for you as well. I saw a recent stream you did, you got, I think it was 10,000 bits and you were extremely surprised. You're like, wow, somebody gave me, thank you. You were just thinking that like, that's a lot of bits to get. And I was, I don't, I'm still learning the terminology, but you were really excited about 10,000, which I think was based on your numbers. There seems about like a hundred bucks, a hundred dollars. That's right.

I'm just not used to somebody being that excited about me coding. You know, we've talked about how Twitch is like for gamers. And I think that that's definitely still their model. And I've gone to TwitchCon, I've gone to their developer day, I've spoken to their developer advocates and their VP of developer platform. And I've said, I know that I'm not your main target, but there is a very unique ecosystem and a very amazing community happening right under your noses. But really like a lot of these income avenues are supposed to be much more sustainable for people who play games because you have a very insatiable audience in gamers.

They're a very intense community. And so they bring a lot of monetary support and fandom to that. I'm not quite sure we've hit that point with like open source fandom so when somebody donated 10 000 bits it was such a huge deal to me because it's not really in the same vein as gaming where 10 000 bits might actually be much less of a deal so it just blew my mind that someone appreciated the stream so much that they wanted to donate that sum of money. Let's have some, yeah, like you said, captive and very enthusiastic fandom.

Also a lot of disposable income, I would suppose, because you're just throwing around $100 bills. Like, it's no big deal. That's, I mean, it was a big, I mean, for you it was a big deal, but you said with the gamers, that seems to be more commonplace. So that's really cool. I didn't realize that there was that level of finance coming into the system.

I know that people were making livings on YouTube and I've heard that there's certain gamers who live stream, you know, professionally, but are you, do you imagine a world where, you know, certain open source live streamers could potentially,

you know, hang up that their, their shoes. Is that what you say? Hang up your shoes. I don't know. Quit your full-time job and, and just be a professional live streamers could potentially, you know, hang up their shoes. Is that what you say? Hang up your shoes? I don't know. Quit your full-time job and just be a professional live streamer? I think that depends on your circumstances.

So I know in the US that can be quite hard because you require a larger sum of subscriptions in order to make that happen, right? There are gamers that have 20,000 subscribers and even at the base level of, you know, $2.50 that they get from every subscriber, that's a lot of money, right? They're totally- Okay. That's monthly.

Yeah. Which is a lot. From what I understand, so I think the base level is roughly $5 American. And I think if I understand the mechanics too, is that that's a split, even split with Twitch, the platform, and you, the publisher. Is that right, Suze? That's right. And so out of every $2.50 some comes your share of taxes that you pay back and also health insurance and all of those things that you actually need to provide for yourself,

given that you're now self-employed. And so I would say that I guess my comment is that in other countries where you have universal health care, you have really, really good public services, you could probably start doing this full time with a lower number of subscribers and with less risk, if that makes sense. So it's definitely feasible in some cases, but I would say that most people wouldn't quit their jobs unless they were making at least two to four thousand dollars a month in subscriptions. And even then, that's a pretty risky endeavor at that amount. Yeah. Yeah. Well, at a 50-50 split, we know who's really making all the money off this. It's Jeff Bezos and Amazon, right? It's the platform that's making all the money.

Yeah. Yeah. To be honest, I mostly turned on subscriptions on mine. So you have to kind of reach a certain bar with Twitch as well, right? You have to prove that you streamed consistently and you stream for X amount of hours per month. Like they do have some, there's a bar to pass so that, you know, you are definitely giving your audience what they want to see. Right. That was my next question. Cause YouTube has a similar threshold. You have to have a

certain amount of like viewed, uh, hours, you know, some sort of bar or consistency that says you're a viable person to to essentially allow into the pay models of this platform that's right and so twitch has two two levels where you become either an affiliate which is the base level which they only introduced last year and then you become a partner which used to be an invite only and it was mostly just gamers and some people who stream creatively such as cosplay producers and things like that. So that's definitely something that you have to pass first. And I've been streaming for just over a year and a half. And I hit those numbers like a very, very long time ago,

but I didn't turn it on because I just, you know, I have a full time job. The main reason why I turned it on was because people really, really wanted to show their appreciation. And it was basically outside pressure where they said, Oh, I can't always join the stream, but I'm so happy that you're doing this, that I would just love to set and forget just a small contribution every month. And so to people that, that can be really meaningful for them to contribute that, even if you didn't necessarily, um, need it yourself. And then you can actually like donate to that, to to charity or you can put it aside to reinvest back into your stream. Like,

but it does actually strengthen the relationship with your audience to a degree, even if you didn't necessarily think that you needed to do it in the first place. It'd be cool to take some of those, some of those funds maybe to buy yourself lunch or something special while you stream. Like, you know, this, like here in Texas, we have this really awesome sparkling water called Topo Chico. It's actually a Mexican water. It's pretty cool. It's good. If you come to Texas, have it, please.

But like, you know, if I drank a Topo Chico while I did, I could be like be like this Topo Chico sponsored by you, the community. That's a really good idea. So there has been cases where people have donated to me when I've said something like, Oh, I should really pick up this board so that I can make a compatible with AVR Galaduino. And then someone will literally send me like an adafruit.com, which is like a microcontroller vendor. They'll literally send me a voucher so that i can actually order it which is so nice and so usually on the next stream i'll say hey you know like um so and so actually like allowed this to happen like you know basically enable this to happen which is really really cool so that's definitely something where people are also very happy to have like a very specific thing that they would like to enable for you or like make it happen,

which is really, really sweet. And I think that could be a bit better than just here is X amount of dollars. So just to be clear on this, this one point before we move on to some other things, you do have the option to turn to turn on or turn off this this funding portion. So it's a it's an optin on your part, the publisher. That's right. Or the streamer, so to speak. It's probably the more correct terminology, streamer.

That's right. Yeah. So you don't necessarily have to do that. You can also become part of the affiliate community or part of the partner community without actually having that subscribe button as well. So it's a perk of passing one of those bars, but it's not necessarily required. Do you, you work from anywhere, right? You're a remote worker. Yes. You don't have to go into an office. No. I wrote a post recently just about the loneliness that potentially comes into those who work from home. Is this, do you feel like this is an outlet for you to hang out with people where

normally you would just be hanging out by yourself on a Sunday rather than like with a community of several thousand people? Is this, is this like, you know, like human touch to you, so to speak? It's funny that you say that because even though my job is really, really public, and even though I do a Twitch stream and I give, I do a lot of public speaking, I think people get the impression that I'm really extroverted and I'm just actually not. I think I care more about helping others than I do about my own introverted comfort, if that makes sense. on Twitch has been a much less overstimulating way for me to meet new people, to help other people also like, you know, become better programmers or just help them make new friends and things like that.

It's actually been better for me to do that because I still get that social hit and those social interactions, but it's usually not as intense as being in person. So I definitely think that that's been a as intense as being in person. So I definitely think that that's been a really nice thing that I've had where I can catch up with a bunch of people who are quite literally like they're regulars now on my stream, but I don't even have to leave the comfort of my own home. Would you say now that you've done this for a while, that you look forward to it, that like without this interaction, you would sort of like be missing out or be depleted of like some satisfaction in life I definitely feel that

my omen source work is now it's just not it wouldn't be the same without them for sure and like I said before when I turned on my stream and I had the wrong url and no one came I felt so sad and I think that definitely was proof to me that, I felt so sad. And I think that definitely was proof to me that I look forward to seeing them just as much as they look forward to seeing me. And I do tend to say that a lot on my stream. I'm like, I'm just so excited that you all are so positive and that you all helped me. And I just want to thank you for joining me. Like that's something that I'm always gushing about just before I turn off the stream. And so I definitely think that I don't think that my open source life and my Sundays would ever be the same if I lost that community.

I feel you. Cause like when we, you know, we do these shows like this, the show we're on right now, like I look forward to this. I look forward to spending the time with Jared. We don't rehearse these shows. I don't know what his perspective is in many cases I'm surprised

having done this show so much with him I do kind of understand him and I kind of kind of anticipate how we'll both sit on certain issues or certain stances or whatnot but like I look you get my jokes yeah I get your jokes some of them but I look forward to the time. I look forward to this. We don't have a live audience here with us. But, you know, in my case, you know, I'm a remote worker. I work from home. And so I don't have a lot of reasons to go out and hang out with, you know, in quotes, real people all the time. Like I have my wife and my son and my daughter and, you know, friends and, and different stuff I do, but nothing forces me to actually hang out with other humans other than my immediate family. So in a lot of cases, you know, for you live streaming in this case and me and Jared and, or me in particular, this is an outlet for me to hang out with other humans and I look forward to it. So I was just curious how that plays into your life. Yeah, I really don't think, I really don't like it when people say things like your friends on the internet are not real friends or that's not a

real community because I totally disagree. And I think that when you feel that you're in a certain niche or you're only interested in things that, you know, not everyone is interested in, it can be really, really difficult to find those friends in real life. And if you want to talk about things, like if you want to have a LAN party, for example, back in the day, you'd be dragging a bunch of computers to somebody's house. And that can be really fun, but it can be really tedious and it's really hard to expand your group. But now when you're playing games online with each other and you're talking to each other via discord, for example, that is just so much more scalable. And, and it's just as real as if you were sitting in the room with those people. So I just, I totally discount anyone that says your online friends are not a real community because it's just not true anymore.

Yeah. I agree with that. There's degrees of disagreement, but pretty much I agree. I would just say, I've actually had a thought about this, and I'll just say this just for the sake of not really trying to disagree with you, but just more of like a thought I've had recently that I've still been meshinghing on so to speak and it's that i wonder if people that in these scenarios if because there's you may have the the online attachment to them in this community aspect i just wonder if it's easier to disconnect from those kind of people that you don't see face to face because for example arguing with somebody face toto-face versus in slack is two completely different scenarios and it's easier to disconnect from people that are digitally connected than say you know face-to-face connected and that's the thing i've been mulling over disconnect good or

disconnect bad well just you know i guess the maybe the easiest way to say it is like drop you like a bad habit that's that's something i say for funnies but like i think that like could you drop me like a bad habit because we have a digital connection versus your face-to-face real life connection that's that's sort of like just something i've that's my varying degree of disagreement is like i'm still thinking about that one well bad habits are actually the hardest thing to break but that's the point you're making so i'll just stop there what's that say that again bad habits are actually really hard to break that's why i you're making. So I'll just stop there. What's that? Say that again. Bad habits are actually really hard to break. That's why I don't understand your statement.

Cause like. Well, a bad habit is very difficult to break. That's why it's a habit and it's bad. Like anyways. Now see, you knew I was going to do that. You get me now.

Come on, take it back. Suze, bring us back into it. How do we get started on Twitch? That's what I want to know. Like we want to do this. We want to check on take it back suze bring us back into how do we get started on twitch that's what i want to know like we want to do this we want to check this out what's our first step yeah that's a good point so i would definitely recommend get started with what you have like if you have a old pair of you know apple iphone headphones with a little microphone on it

go with that you know if you have a laptop without an external monitor, doesn't matter. Um, for me, don't feel like you have to have this like super professional setup to get started, which is what I'm sure that you tell a lot of people who ask, like, how do I start a podcast? It's just like, just get it, get your stuff going. And then if you know that this is something you want to commit to, that's where you can start investing from there. People make the mistake of, they also procrastinate by ordering stuff, right? They're like, oh, well, you know, if I, if I order this stuff, then I have to set it up. And that means I don't have to start today, you know, and things like that. So I usually just say,

go as lo-fi as you can, download something that doesn't cost any money, such as OBS, which stands for Open Broadcaster Software, is an open source cross-platform piece of software that a lot of streamers use. So you're already going to find things that plug really well into it. You're going to be able to find a lot of YouTube tutorials on how to use OBS and a lot of blog posts as well. So definitely go with what everyone else is using and go with like equipment you already have. And then basically just work yourself up from there. Most people just want to see your desktop so that they can actually see what you're working on and they want to see your webcam. So don't go overboard with all the widgets and things like that. Just kind of like watch a bunch of streams, find what you think would work for you

and just sort of start experimenting from there and just begin with the basics. What about hiding things? Is there anything you do to prep yourself to say, I got some secrets on my computer and how do you make sure that no one sees those things? Is that an issue for you? Yeah, everyone always asks about this. I love it. Because to me, I just saw that as like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna have stuff that I need to hide. So I'll think about this. So a lot of the time I'm working with APIs, especially when I'm doing my Azure streams, a lot of things have secrets, where I don't want people to see that. So if possible, ahead of time,

I'll start a new directory and I'll just say to people, hey, here's this.env file, which is what we tend to use in Node.js. Here's this.env file. Here's a sample file where it doesn't have the values in it. This is what I've got stored here. So if you see me referring to any of these variables, it's because of this. And that tends to be really helpful for people. And then I have a couple of Chrome extensions that will hide private data in some of the different management consoles that I use. So in Azure, for example, which I'm in a lot, it will blur all of my keys. And even just like my email address at the top, it will neutralize that. So I try to be as careful as possible. There are definitely times where something has just not worked, or I'll need

to like refresh an API key or something. And I have like a little really cute little cartoon picture of me with like a little padlock. And it's a secret. And I just have it so that I can hit a key on a keyboard, and it will just sort of cover just the desktop part of my screen. So everything else on my Twitch feed is still visible and you can see my webcam, but I'm just sort of like arranging things without people seeing and then I can just toggle it back off again. So if you have multiple strategies, you tend to be okay. I have literally popped open a local storage console in the DevTools before, and I've accidentally left a prior API key in there,

and I've just started laughing. And then I've navigated to the website, clicked to cycle the token, and then I've moved on. And so it will happen. You've just got to mitigate the risk of, is this going to be the end of the world if I accidentally show it? And maybe just decide whether or not you're actually going to show that, um, that project that day. It really is about mitigating risk. But most of the time you're just like rotating a key because you accidentally showed it. It's actually not too much of a drama. I was, I'm always worried about things like that. Like, uh, I know Jared's heard before the show, like, you know, what did they see my passwords? Like you got all these little fears and there's, there's YouTube videos out there of, you know, extreme Twitch fails, which can go really extreme or just really benign, like whatever. But there's, I mean, cause being live, you know, things happen.

That's the easiest way to say it. You got any other embarrassing moments, Suze, throughout your year and a half? Yes. One of my favorite things was I was trying to test out my library with an Arduino, and I'm running the code, and it kept coming up with the error that I wrote myself. It kept saying, no Arduino board found, no Arduino board found. And at that moment, especially when live streaming and you don't know what's wrong, you don't just get up and make a cup of tea. You're just frozen. You are just completely paralyzed.

And you're like, this is boring for them to watch. I can't figure it out. Oh my goodness. What am I going to do? I'm just completely stuck. Like I don't have anything to go with. Like this, this code worked literally five minutes ago. And the problem was that I had two Arduinos on my desk and I picked up the one where, so an Arduino board is basically,

it's an AVR chip and it's put into a socket. And then from there they break it out into these like really easy to use pins. And so it's, the Arduino is made up of like those two pieces. And I just happened to have like popped off one of the microchips on an Arduino board because I was using it in another project. And I just picked up that board. There was no chip on it. So, you know, the chip's not going to answer back when I talk to it if it's not actually present. So one of my Twitch viewers, and he's actually very knowledgeable about hardware. He lives in Hong Kong and he commutes to Jensen a lot. He was just like, Suze, the chip's not on the board. And I looked at the chat message and I'm like, don't be silly. And then I picked up

the board and I was like, oh my God, you're right. And I actually have a YouTube video of this in my blog post where I'm just like, I cannot believe I was trying to talk to a chip that literally wasn't there. So that's hilarious. They're the little moments that everyone really likes. And that's why you should live stream. It shows that you're human. And also people get that little hit of dopamine because they're like, I helped or I was right. Or, you know, it's like playing a game show from home. That's awesome. That's really interesting. I mean, especially the humanizing part.

It was like, even Suze messes up. Right. Yeah. Which I find hilarious because I just don't see myself in that way. So when people are like, even Suze messes up, I'm like, I mess up all the time. What are you talking about? There is no perfect Suze that you're thinking of. She literally does not exist. Maybe let's close with this. Jayden, unless perfect Suze that you're thinking of. Like she literally does not exist.

Maybe let's close with this. Jay, unless you got something else you want to cover. Well, I got a thing, but we'll see what you say. Maybe it's the same thing. OK, let's see if it's the same thing then. What advice could you share? Like we've we've covered, you know, different parts of your life. You work at Microsoft, DevRel.

Like there's probably lots of facets you can give advice back to. But, you know, if you have the ear of the developer community to share some crucial advice, what's one piece of crucial advice you would share back to the open source community and the developer community to say, this is how you get started with something. This is how you take your first step. What is some good advice that you may want to share on the show? I think my biggest advice is to always stay curious. And I know that my one of my friends online, who runs fun, fun function,

Matias, he always says that at the end of his videos, he says, and you know, until next time, stay curious. And I think that if people continually ask questions and ask them with good intentions, I think that that lowers the barrier for more junior developers to be able to ask questions too. And then it just stops this kind of weird thing where we're always trying to seem smart for appearances. I just feel that everyone is a beginner at something once, even if they become an expert at it later on. And so you always have to start somewhere. And all you have to do is have that curiosity to just start something. And it's the same with Twitch. You just have to be curious about, hmm, I wonder if people would actually be interested in what I'm doing. I wonder if I could make this into a thing that I can

commit to every single time. You know, you just have to be curious about what your capabilities are and just assume that you can have a go at something. All right, Jerry, what about you, man? Was it the same? No, it's different. It's different. I like it. But we'll close on this one. So speaking of being curious,

I'm curious about other people live streaming on twitch so we have twitch.tv slash no op cat that sues we've been talking about your channel and your community what about some other people are there uh when i go to twitch and search for open source or search for programming i find a bunch of gaming channels that are are named like they might be programming channels and i'm wondering if there's like a group of live streamers like yourself that there's a list somewhere or, you know, other channels that people could follow that are open source or even just hacking in general.

Yeah, that's a great question. It takes a long time to find the people who you want to watch and who have a very similar personality where they interact with the chat a lot my biggest recommendation is to check out uh my friend tyranny's awesome streamers repo on github he has a bunch of people listed and every single person has their own page that has like their twitter whether they stream on twitch mixer youtube you know wherever they actually are and how often they stream which is really really cool and so I think he's been able to curate a really good list. And I can also give you any extras that aren't already on there. But there is a bunch of us that have found each other and we all sort of

send our community to each other's accounts and things like that, because we all have a collective, I guess, goal to create really nice, inclusive and informative streams. So that's definitely what I'd recommend checking out first. Very cool. You were at the top of this list. BNB slash Awesome Developer Streams. That is it. I think it stands for Bit and Bash or something.

Or Bit and Bang, I think his username is. You're number one on this list so now I know why you're using this one. Just kidding. And there's a lot more too. There's a whole bunch of them. At least 30 or 40 I would say. Just a quick guess. And it looks like a

great starting place. Yeah, it's really heavily curated and I've actually met some of these people at TwitchCon and we've discussed tips and tricks for coding streams and things like that, because we are still a niche community. So it's been really difficult for us to find each other. So I'd say that Tyranny has done a really good job at connecting us all so we can kind of,

you know, watch each other's streams and learn from each other, but also share our community. Interesting. I like this. I mean, this is similar to podcasts. The most often way you find out about new and interesting things or things you should be paying attention to is usually word of mouth because, you know, the directories are just so massive or have so much to offer. It's hard to sort of slice it down into these are the ones you can focus on or this is what I could recommend. I mean, obviously, you got iTunes and whatnot and other areas. But, you know, we're recommended on Twitter a lot, and I find that's the best way for me to even find podcasts is like person recommendations.

Usually Jared. Yep. Usually. Usually me. Yeah, kind of a podcast junkie. Yeah, what's cool is that Twitch has this thing called Raids. I don't know if you've heard of Raids. No.

But what you do is when you're finishing a stream, you send, like it's kind of it sometimes uses a trolling technique but you send or you stick all of your community onto someone who's just started streaming at the same time as you you're like go to this person go say hi and so sometimes you'll get an influx of you know like 50 people uh coming in and saying hi all at once and it can get very overwhelming. So you can turn off that feature, but it started as an unofficial thing, and Twitch actually integrated it fully into their system.

So that can be a really good way of passing people along so that they can discover new things. And I find that that's extremely unique to the live streaming community, especially in gaming. That's very cool. I never heard of that. That's a great idea. I can see how it could definitely backfire for people who are just getting started to suddenly have an influx of viewers. Yeah, absolutely.

We'll definitely link up this repo too because sharing lists, we have an awesome topic,, an awesome topic, literally an awesome topic on a change law news, where if you go to change law.com right now and you follow, we, if you haven't been there in a while, this is speaking to you, Suze, as well as the, the listening audience. You know, if you haven't been there in a while, let's say since, uh, if you haven't been there this year, go there, check it out. Our, the news we ship out every single week in our weekly email called ChangeLog Weekly is

now a real-time, I guess as much as it can be real-time, news feed on our front page. So we're going to go there and share this awesome developer streams this week in news. And we like doing that. We like to share that. And so we also have a topic, which is technically a tag to some degree, that's called Awesome. And it's all the awesome lists out there so this will join that uh doing that alone that awesome topic yeah before before we go i want to give a shout out to another live streamer one that we know quite well yeah at least we know him by his handle which is joe bue 42 and joe-E-B-E-W-42 on Twitch.

He's been live streaming while he contributes to open source. And lately he's actually been contributing to our website, which has been very cool. Changelog.com is an open source Elixir app. And Joe has lovingly crafted a few features for us, including a JSON feed, which he just recently added. And so it's been very fun to watch him live stream as he picks through mostly my code

and second guesses all the things that I do. And it's very fun kind of meta, but he's a great live streamer. So maybe I should open up a pull request on this list and get him added. But Joe, thanks for streaming and thanks for contributing to uh our open source projects absolutely and i think it's interesting too because it's it's uh as well as suze but it's

a source of inspiration like i didn't think anybody would like grab our repo and start like setting it up live on twitch and like showing off all the areas where maybe it is or is not easy to set up like the first time you run the project and you know, what goes into like getting an Elixir app running and whatnot. That's like, that's what he did first. And that was really cool. I never really,

that's inspiring. It's a long story short. Yep. Well, so is anything else you want to cover before we go? I know we've, we've taken up quite a bit of your time, but I'm sure you've got lots to share.

Anything else you want to cover before we close out the show? No, I think that's it. But if anyone hasn't checked out live coding streams before and they're just not sure whether or not it would help them learn things as a developer, not necessarily streaming themselves, definitely check people out because I think that it's something that is very, very different from anything else. And you don't have to be this like hardcore gamer to like watch people live streaming.

So I just want people to sort of see whether or not it's a medium that is really helpful to them. So Twitch is cool for software developers, is what you're saying? Yes. Or YouTube Live or Mixer or a bunch of other different avenues. Yes. Awesome. Well, thank you, Suze, for your time today.

Thank you for all you're doing up in Source. And we really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. This was super fun. All right. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Change Log. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a friend.

Go on Twitter, go on Overcast, favorite it, go on Apple Podcasts, and give us a rating, whatever it takes. Share it with a friend. And thank you to our sponsors, DigitalOcean, Gliffy, and GoCD. Also, thanks to our bandwidth partner, Fastly.com. Air monitoring is done by Rollbar here at Change Log. Check them out at Rollbar.com and we host everything we do

on Linode cloud servers. Head to Linode.com slash Changelog. Check them out. Support this show. The Changelog is hosted by myself, Adam Stachowiak, and Jared Santo. Editing for this episode is by Jonathan Youngblood. Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

And you can find more shows just like this at changelog.com or an Apple podcast or an Overcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.