First Week of Live DevOps Coding on Twitch
Last week I jumped into the world of live streaming on Twitch and thought I would share my initial experience so far. You are probably asking yourself, Mike, are you a gamer? I am not. Other than some nostalgia type NES and 90's arcade games, I don't get much time to game anymore. Gamers are the majority on the Twitch platform, however there are many other categories including Science and Technology. Many in the developer community focus on streaming live coding where the audience interacts with the host on the solution. I was not familiar with the Twitch platform or live coding until Jeff Fritz aka csharpfritz a presentation on using Twitch that gave me the inspiration to give it a try.
I enjoy learning about various development and DevOps topics. Last weekend in particular, I was researching about multi-stage YAML pipelines now that it has gone GA to make a new blog post about it if it was ready for prime time usage. I had the idea that this might be a great topic and format for live streaming. Instead of me learning, by myself, why not do it in front of others. I needed a time, that I knew I could consistently do the streaming and landed on 7:00am CDT. I knew this wouldn't be the most popular time but to me it was more important to getting a consistent schedule and just because it is 7:00am where I live, it is prime time somewhere else in the world.
Over the past twenty years, I have done numerous presentations and demos however, these demos were practiced and I typically demo topics I have done dozens of times. Learning in front of peers is a different experience. I was actually so nervous about it, I had a horrible night sleep before my first big day. I know I learn by doing and by solving the problems I run into. We ran into plenty of problems and it was a scary feeling like I had to figure them out quickly. Time always feels like it is magnified when in front of a group. Even though it felt like an eternity, I kept coming up with some new options to try and we got things to work. It was really exciting for me when I had several people join the streams and chime in with some possible solutions.
My channel has a bit of an identity problem like me. I plan to cover all topics Azure, DevOps, Azure DevOps but also some development topics like Microservices. I thought it would be fun to crowd source the topics for upcoming shows. I created a GitHub repo for provide information about the show, board with all of the show topics, and using issues for people to submit topics they want me to go through. I plan to host two types of shows. The one I have started with is the Learning Series where we are learning new stuff together. The other is the Demo Series. In these shows, I will spend more type demoing features that I know how to do.
This experience so far has been humbling. I'm a person that always needs to figure out as many answers as possible to try to minimize the problems. This has taught me that it is ok that I don't have all of the answers and it might take a couple times to figure things out. I do feel like one of my "super powers" is figuring stuff out quickly, so this definitely helps. I think another good thing that will come out of this is being able to adapt and to be more impromptu when it comes to speaking.
I know I'm still just getting started in the world of Twitch. I have an entire list of upgrades I want to get however, I wanted to prove to myself I was going to be consistent with this before spending any money. On my wish list, I have a green screen, light, new web cam to name a few. Have you tried buying a webcam lately? They seem to be as rare as toilet paper. I also need to update the graphics on my channel and starting incorporating some extensions to connecting with viewers.
I look forward to offering more of a variety of stream times to reach a wider audience and upgrading my streaming equipment. Twitch has levels based on activity. I'm currently trying to reach affiliate status. I need 50 followers and an average of 3 viewers.
Here is my Twitch channel. Please check it out for the latest stream times and follow if interested. https://www.twitch.tv/mikedouglasdev
Here is my GitHub repo with all of the information you need for my channel: https://github.com/mikedouglasdev/twitch-streaming
Project Board - What topics do you want to see next on the show? https://github.com/users/mikedouglasdev/projects/1
