Coding before a live audience

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tokumaru
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Re: Coding before a live audience

Post by tokumaru »

You should definitely plan at least the basic outline of the program, and the order you want to implement things, otherwise you might end up losing precious time and making the whole thing harder for the audience to follow.
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pubby
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Re: Coding before a live audience

Post by pubby »

As someone interested in coding I have zero interest in watching others do it.

Pick another hobby to demo.
Pokun
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Re: Coding before a live audience

Post by Pokun »

Yeah I think even Pong is a bit too much to do in a live session, and as Tokumaru said, it's unrealistic to expect that newbies would grasp enough of NES programming in an hour to be able to learn anything significant from it. And if done more like a introductory demonstration I think one hour is a long time.

In the same thread I already stated my opinion on video tutorials:
Pokun wrote:
dougeff wrote:Someone once asked me if I could demonstrate programming a NES game, like live in front of an audience. I laughed. Ok, if an audience is willing to watch me sit and type quietly for 12-14 hours, I could bang together a very simple Super Mario Bros style scroller.

The joke being, of course, it takes way too much time to do even a simple game. It would be painfully boring to watch.
Yeah some things are best explained by showing, and programming isn't one of them. Video tutorials are slow, if you loose concentration for an instance or try to fast-forward a little, you easily miss what the teacher is doing and won't be able to follow anymore, you are forced to rewind and watch the part again. Another bad thing is if you quit in the middle of the video it's a pain to find where you where last time, or if you need to review an old part of the tutorial you have to search in the video search-bar, it's almost impossible to get to a point where the context makes sense without watching it all over again. Also you can't glean through the video like with text when searching it.
Everything takes like ten times the time than learning from text and pictures that you can study in your own pace. Certain parts of a tutorial might be better shown in short video clips, but definitely not punching code.
And doing it live is even worse than recording a video. The audience naturally can't rewind, so the demonstration might need to be something much lighter than a full game.
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gauauu
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Re: Coding before a live audience

Post by gauauu »

pubby wrote:As someone interested in coding I have zero interest in watching others do it.
I agree, but some people like that kind of thing (shrug). I live streamed my first few coding sessions of last year's nesdev competition entry, and I had a good handful of people that decided to watch.

(It ended up being too hard to concentrate while live streaming and talking about the code, so I gave that up pretty quickly)
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Bregalad
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Re: Coding before a live audience

Post by Bregalad »

pubby wrote:As someone interested in coding I have zero interest in watching others do it.

Pick another hobby to demo.
+1

The only reason I'd have any interest is if it's presenting a new language or paradigm or something, and even that is stretching it a bit when another medium such as a book or static web page makes a better medium for that (we the audience can follow at our own rythm).
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