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Ask HN: Who are your most treasured live coders?
I just watched lichess founder Thibault live-coding lichess on twitch. The stream had about 10 viewers. Blows my mind that such minds are accessible if you know where to look.
Others I treasure are: john romero (twitch), george hotz (twitch), and stephen wolfram (twitch, youtube).
The latter also has astonishingly low viewer numbers (typically <20).
What other lesser-known gems are out there?
- youngbowie 3y agoHarkirat singh is too good. He made and deployed Leetcode and Google Meet/Omegle end-to-end.
- karimf 3y agoThePrimeagen. Sometimes I lost my spark with programming. Watching him reminds me to enjoy programming more.
- muffa 3y ago+1, he is entertaining :)
- VirusNewbie 3y agoI don't have time to watch him regularly, but I really enjoy that he can both walk the walk as well as pontificate on a variety of programming topics. There are a lot of coding streamers/influencers who don't have the breadth and depth he does, nor the high level experience at a top tech company. They either did a year at Meta and became full time streamers, or are purely competitive programmers, but ThePrimeagen hits the sweet spot for me. I think he's a great example for lots of engineers everywhere, especially those who are just getting into the idustry. He didn't have an easy path either of just getting a FAANG internship and job right out of college, he had to work his way up to where he is now.
- rrishi 3y agoI used to like him but started to feel he keeps ranting about very similar topics a lot: 1. neovim >>> vscode 2. X > JS (X=Rust, Go, OCaml etc) I feel he doesn't do justice to his seniority and breadth of knowledge. He, for sure, knows a ton. Yet chooses to waste streams on noob topics like editor wars, programming language wars etc. I much prefer Theo-T3 because he finds interesting topics and really explores tech in depth.
- qup 3y ago> Yet he chooses to get hella views with noob topics like editor wars, programming language wars etc. I fixed that. Those topics almost certainly perform better because they're automatically controversial.
- joshxyz 3y agotheo t3 excels very well on this one, really finds the balance on talking about opposing views of different people without being overly opinionated about it.
- kingkongjaffa 3y agoI find the total opposite, his video feed just reads like the front page of HN most low effort topic. Im not hating at all but for example https://youtu.be/ZOYp6-k9HhE?feature=shared https://youtu.be/ZOYp6-k9HhE?feature=shared Theres nothing insightful there that wasnt just in the comments of hn a few days ago.
- lakomen 3y agoHe's a Troll and authoritarian. At first he was kind-of entertaining, but he's full of himself and thinks he knows it all. And his stupid, nonsensical editor wars. The more I watched him to more u disliked him and eventually unfollowed. And his noob topics are boring as well. He's pretty much the average HN user, only more experienced. He believes the hype. Like htmx is hyped so he does htmx. His streams provide nothing for me in terms of new information that us useful.
- level87 3y ago[dead]
- kebsup 3y agoI like to watch his blog post reads on YouTube.
- umbs 3y agoThere's some strong views about ThePrimeagen in this thread. Just want to share my experience. I've spent tonnes of time configuring Vim, Neovim etc. Its ... a ... mess. I love both editors and for the love of me, I don't know why configuring them is soooo hard and brittle. ThePrimeagen videos on Vim/Neovim is by far information dense videos. It took me sometime to ignore his style of presentation and just focus on content. However, the value I got out of watching his videos is undeniable. Knowing his background a bit and how he battled addiction gave me some context. (Sorry can't find that video on his channel now) Continuing on this topic of Vim/Neovim ... Leeren Chen (https://www.youtube.com/@leeren_ https://www.youtube.com/@leeren_) is pure genius on the topic of configuring Vim. I've never seen another person like him on Youtube, who uses Vimscript to configure Vim to make it work like an IDE (almost). [1] https://youtu.be/JFr28K65-5E https://youtu.be/JFr28K65-5E [2] https://youtu.be/Gs1VDYnS-Ac https://youtu.be/Gs1VDYnS-Ac TJ Devries (https://www.youtube.com/@teej_dv https://www.youtube.com/@teej_dv) videos on Neovim are awesome too (He's core dev of Neovim). But there's lot of gimmicks in his video and it can put people off. His videos with @BashBunni is very approachable in terms of learning about and configuring Neovim.
- TheAlchemist 3y agoWow, I had no idea it was a thing ! Thank you very much - I will definitely watch some of those.
- andher 3y agoGeorge Hotz is always so interesting to watch, although I watch the youtube video after more than live
- ActorNightly 3y agoHis early streams back in the day when he was doing CTFs were so much better. Now its just him trying to flex is ego while rambling about bad the government is and how great Musk is. Libertarian brain rot is real.
- mickelsen 3y agoI think it's about losing patience with ideas he already holds, seeing that they never get a chance for implementation. I believe this happens to all of us as we get older, regardless of our political beliefs.
- ActorNightly 3y agoIm betting its more of the fact that he got a pretty serious lawsuit by Sony at his early age, which probably does not do good for ones mental development. Getting beaten down like that by the world would probably leave a good number of people with a general disdain for society. Happened to Musk as well. He also self admittedly got addicted to painkillers at one point in time, so that doesn't help either. W
- jurgenwerk 3y agoTerry Davis
- sturmdev 3y agoJon Gjengset is great for educational Rust content. “Tsoding Daily/Tsoding” on YouTube/Twitch is entertaining and covers a very wide range of topics. I don’t think he’s “classically trained” per se, but he’s knowledgeable and great at solving interesting problems. I haven’t checked it out yet, but I think Ryan Carniato (the creator of SolidJS) streams live coding on YouTube too.
- pests 3y agoJon is here on the site if you didn't know. Tsoding is really entertaining. Not classically trained but very smart and amusing.
- nomemory 3y agoTsoding has nice YouTube videos on original topics: customizing TempleOs, writing a snake game in the bootloader, writing FE code in C. It's virtual insanity at its finest.
- quibono 3y agoAgreed on Tsoding. I'm always impressed with all the ideas, very original stuff.
- metaketa 3y agoPieter Levels. Dutch guy that shows how he codes his multiple ventures, with good business sense
- marginalia_nu 3y agoIt tried doing some coding videos a while back mostly to make up for not having colleagues. Live coding is stupidly hard. I admire anyone who pulls it off.
- mike1o1 3y agoTenderlove (Aaron Patterson) from the Ruby and Rails core team does live streaming every now and then, with some good guests from the Ruby community. https://www.youtube.com/@TenderlovesCoolStuff https://www.youtube.com/@TenderlovesCoolStuff Some examples: Writing a test framework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmi-SWeH4MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmi-SWeH4MA Hacking on the Prism compiler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6loKD2LXxbc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6loKD2LXxbc
- wetpaws 3y agoCarmack
- swah 3y agoDoesn't stream
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoYeah what a pity. I really want to watch him go back to keen and program game engines on DOS again.
- swah 3y agoMost likely some AR stuff what needs optimization :D
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoDefinitely, or AI stuffs.
- runjake 3y agoDave Plummer but I’m way beyond the median age for HN. Would appreciate similar recommendations. Though I respect them, people like ThePrimeagen and Theo-t3.gg are too high energy for my tastes. https://youtube.com/@DavesGarage?feature=shared https://youtube.com/@DavesGarage?feature=shared
- kingkongjaffa 3y agoTheo-t3.gg Is massively just click bait and commentating on industry drama tbh.
- TimSchumann 3y agoAndreas Kling of Serenity OS -- https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling Andrew Kelley of Zig -- https://www.twitch.tv/andrewrok https://www.twitch.tv/andrewrok Really enjoy watching both of them work, and they're both so... calm, cool, and collected in their focus on the technology they're working on as opposed to 'content creation.'
- npv789 3y agohotz
- swah 3y agoAlso enjoy hotz due to ranting. (Actually I'd consume more of that kind of content ie unpolished, quick videos. To me, the signal-to-noise is higher on videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovNZU-gzr6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovNZU-gzr6A than videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fAtiORLAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fAtiORLAg, which seem to take 99% of youtube)
- swah 3y agoI remember the Minecraft guy streaming a decade or more ago - it was super popular. I feel he's totally gone from online for a decade too...
- BD103 3y agoBy "Minecraft guy," do you mean the person who made Minecraft? I think his name was Markus Persson, but he went by Notch online...
- badpun 3y agoJonathan Blow, currently coding a new programming language, and, in parallel to the language development, a commercial-quality AA game in this language as a proof of concept.
- elintknower 3y agoGeorge Hotz
- pierredewet 3y agoAl Sweigart (Automate the boring stuff, Recursive book of recursion…) live codes on YT (https://youtube.com/@AutomateTheBoringStuff https://youtube.com/@AutomateTheBoringStuff)
- mooch3k 3y agoBig George Hotz enjoyer but lately I’ve been trying to catch every stream from this guy “tokyospliff” - https://youtube.com/@tokyospliff https://youtube.com/@tokyospliff He does graphics programming, writing his own game engine from in C++ using OpenGL. The vibe in his streams is really something else, very interesting guy.
- dave84 3y agoThere's a fairly substantial Demoscene live coding community with shader coding and non-competitive jams (with an archive here: https://livecode.demozoo.org/ https://livecode.demozoo.org/) You can take a look at the final of the Shader Showdown at Revision last year here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ7KAD0NyGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ7KAD0NyGw There's a TIC-80 'bytejam' every Monday Night (8 or 9pm UK time depending on the week) on https://www.twitch.tv/fieldfxdemo https://www.twitch.tv/fieldfxdemo And you can catch some previous VODs here: https://scenesat.com/videoarchive https://scenesat.com/videoarchive