Comment by Jason Knight on "Do you live stream your coding, or make screencasts?"

I generally find video tutorials useless, so I'd be hard pressed to say what to even put into one. To that end it's not really something I ever considered.

I had similar issues in school back in the '80's where you hand me the textbook I'll know the years coursework in a week, but if the only education technique in use is the teacher standing at the front of the room prattling on I can't learn a damned thing from it.

The awkward pauses, incomplete thoughts, lack of ability to search or cross-reference it... it ranges from annoying to useless so I would not inflict that upon others. I learn by reading and doing, not by watching.

Hence why WHEN I see a video tutorial on a subject I find interesting, or really any instructional video or livestream, the first words out of my mouth is "do you have a transcript with the relevant slides?"

If you don't like the movie, I've got slides! - The Joker

that's true obviously a tutorial does not replace the RTFM, but bootstraping the whole thing to see it running first helps sometimes.

Glad you shared your thoughts on this Jason.

It definitely depends on the person for video tutorials to be useful, but I agree that written info is useful to have alongside. In terms of tutorials or courses, I do plan on writing up a blog article each time that I can link to, and vice versa (embed the video in the article).

I do consider livestreams to be different though. It's a way to showcase what debugging is actually like and how real projects are built. A lot of the times I just have one open for background noise, and will occasionally pay more attention when I hear something interesting.

Sunny Singh Your reply actually made me think of a really useful scenario for this that is NOT about showing it to others; self-review.

Sports teams will often watch their own games, looking for errors and ways to improve. Combat pilots review their own telemetry and gun camera footage for the same reasons both in training and in action.

So... in that sense I could see the use of showing the actual process in real-time.

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