First Live Stream is in the Can!

Well, I successfully completed the first live stream! I gotta say, it was not the experience I was hoping for.

• Notes from the talk.
• Actual Video

What I thought it would be like

• I’ve given Lunch and Learns and Seminars before. Things I took for granted in those scenarios are:
  • You can see the audience. You can tell if they’re bored, confused or following along.
  • The interaction is real-time. When you’re streaming the lag can be 3 – 20 seconds and that’s a killer when you’re trying to ask a question to a group and you’re waiting for a response. It felt like an eternity.
  • People are signing up to give you their whole attention. I’ve watched live events before while making dinner or doing other things and if the speaker was hoping for me to be immediately available after asking a question that’s NOT the expectation.
• Pair Programming
  • Again, in pair programming, there’s an expectation of a back-and-forth. As the group gets larger, the bystander effect kicks in.
  • I to share this video publicly. Most people aren’t signing up to be in an audience that’s getting published. I wouldn’t!

Other Challenges

• Something that is also obvious retrospectively, when people are gaming WHO CARES if you show up half way through. It doesn’t matter. However, when you’re trying to teach someone something, missing the first half is brutal.
• I tried to cover too many topics. Copilot principles + Copilot + Copilot Chat + Copilot CLI + the differences between VS Code and Visual Studio… You could do a half hour digging into each with all of their permutations.
• I didn’t do slides, but I put my notes in a .md to share on GitHub. I KNOW that I will iterate on these moving forward so I wanted someplace to share them. However, NOT making the slides meant I felt more scattered in terms of what I was teaching next. I felt like I missed key points and had to frequently call back to things I should have said earlier. Really, this came down to a lack of preparation and a desire to put TOO many things in.

Next Options

I know that I still want accountability while I am building things. So what are the options?

• Standard YouTube Videos – These are certainly the gold standard when trying to teach someone something. I got YouTube premium just so I could download videos directly to my phone and listen to them on the lock screen like a podcast.
  
  My concern with doing these is I don’t want to start focusing on the production value of these videos. Channels like ThePrimeagen do a really good job of talking about development with a high production value. However, that absolutely requires multiple re-takes and a focus on video and audio quality. I want to focus on learning and sharing and I’m worried about getting sucked in to trying to make something look good rather than just getting the stuff out there.
  
  This also doesn’t have the public commitment of “here’s a date when I said I would do the thing” to keep the focus on the learning.
• Pair Programming with a Friend – The Flutter team does a really good set of videos like this. They teach about a topic but because there’s another person to interact with it feels much more conversational. These feel more like a seminar and a conversation and it’s easier to go back and forth. I really like this format, but I have a suspicion that finding a good partner will be tricky!
• Straight up live streaming while coding – There are a number of streamers who just stream themselves writing code. I think this is a pretty sweet setup because it has that combination of “pop in when you feel like it, I am doing something” like gaming streams have. One of the things that felt super awkward when teaching on stream was when I had to pause, ignore the audience, and look something up. Could you imagine that kind of dead air in a seminar?
• Stop Focusing on options that require real-time – Any video or presentation requires that you do a sequence of actions correctly in order for it to be a “good take”. Blogging certainly doesn’t have that same standard so maybe that’s a fine way to go for now?

Definitely going to start thinking about how to share things the learnings again! I’m sure you’ll see more here soon once I figure out the next thing I plan on diving into!