Think different by live-streaming your coding sessions

Live-streaming coding sessions is presented as a way for programmers to break out of familiar habits and think through problems differently. The article follows Adam Wulf, who streamed the full development of a new app, Spare Parts, and found the format useful for narration, feedback, and collaboration.

Reading notes

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• The piece links the idea of “thinking different” to Apple’s slogan and applies it to programmers who feel stuck.
• It says live-streaming programming is becoming more common.
• Adam Wulf streamed every line of code for a new mobile app over 14 days and 17 sessions.
• He originally started streaming some Loose Leaf code as a way to introduce the code to the community.
• He wanted his next app to be finished faster and to be 100% open source.
• Wulf says streaming an entire app from start to finish lets people see how an idea develops from early prototypes to a polished app.
• Viewers asked questions and suggested features, and he implemented some of them during the stream.
• He says narrating his thought process out loud forced him to think through problems differently and helped him.
• He describes live-streaming as “living documentation” of the codebase.
• He says the setup and production costs were minimal and recommends that others try it.