Twitch: GNOME live coding streaming

danigm — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0100

This year I've started with something that I wanted to do since the first COVID lockdown, but never did. So as a first year resolution I decided to start streaming and I created my Twitch channel Abentogil.

I've been thinking about streaming since lockdown, when a group of Spanish people created a nice initiative to teach kids how to code and other tech stuff. I never participated on that initiative, but it was the seed of this.

This year I've seen other GNOME streamers doing live coding, like ebassi and Georges and, at the end, I pluck up the courage to start.

The plan

I've started with one our at the end of my day, so I'm trying to stream from Monday to Thursday from 20:00 to 21:00 (CET).

This routing also will help me to spend more time in free software development regularly, so not just on weekends or holidays, but a bit of work everyday.

Right now I've started working on my own projects, like Timetrack and Loop. I've fixed some issues that I had with Gtk4 in Timetrack and I've started to work on the Loop app to add a MIDI keyboard.

The other day I discovered the Music Grid app idea in the gitlab and it's related with the MIDI implementation I've been working on, so the next thing that I'll do on my streams is to create this music grid widget and add it to the Loop app, to have a nice Music creation App.

The language: Live coding in Spanish

I've decided to do the streaming mainly in Spanish. The main reason to do that is because now you can find documentation and a lot of videos in English, but for people that doesn't master the English language, it's harder to follow this content and even harder to participate, to ask or say something.

Spanish is also my main language, and the idea is not just create tutorials or something like that, this is just for fun, and if I'm able to create a small community or influence someone, I want to show that the language is not a unbreakable barrier.

I want to make this for the Spanish community, but that doesn't mean that for some streams I cannot talk in English, all depends on the audience, of course, if a non Spanish speaker comes and ask something, I'll answer in English and try to do multilingual stream.

The International English is the language to use in Free Software, but it's really important to do not convert that in a barrier, because there are a lot of different communities and people that don't know the language and the first contact with something new is always better in your main language. Everything is easier with help from people that's near to your cultural background.

The future

Right now I'm working on Loop and every stream is similar, live coding on this Gtk4 music APP, but in the future I'll do different streams, doing different things on each week day. These are the current ideas that could be a day on my stream:

Maintenance day: Work on my apps, code review, fixes, releases, and development.
GNOME Love day: Give some love to the GNOME project, look for simple bugs to solve in different projects, help with translations, initiatives, and other possible one hour task to give some love to the project in general.
Learning day: Pick some technology and learn by doing, for example, I can explore new programming languages writing a simple app, learn about Linux writing a driver, learn how to animate with blender, anything new to play and discover.
Newcomers day: Create simple tutorial or introduction to some technology, How to write a GNOME Shell extension, how to create a Gtk4 app in python, teach to code from zero, etc.

This is just a list of ideas, if I discover any other interesting use of this time and stream, I can do that. The final goal of this is to have fun, and if someone learns something in the journey, that's even better.

I'll also upload any interesting stream to youtube, so the good content could be viewed on demand.

So if you like this, don't hesitate to view some of the streams and say "Hola":

danigm.net - outreach

Twitch: GNOME live coding streaming

The plan

The language: Live coding in Spanish

The future