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I've been working on something which lets people follow along at their own pace and see exactly what goes into building a project. It involves a fair amount of

I've been working on something which lets people follow along at their own pace and see exactly what goes into building a project. It involves a fair amount of just plinking away at a text editor and then compiling it and giving things a test run. I set it up to show my sessions including any little lags, typos, or whatever else I might make along the way. The idea is to show how a real person works at this stuff, and to encourage other people to give it a spin at their leisure. To that end, I have a pause button, variable speed playback, buttons for jumping forward and backward, and of course unlimited restarts. All of this happens in the browser, and it's just text, not video, so it's pretty quick. I use my own favorite text editor and build tool, but anyone so inclined can certainly use their own favorites and it will work out just the same. I try to twiddle a few things here and there to show what sort of differences they make in the end. So far, people really seem to dig it.

shubb 14y ago
It's intriguing to see how someone clearly very comfortable on unix works on the terminal.
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  I'm actually holding back on some of the crazier bits so it doesn't seem to fly by. I don't use the reverse-i-search thing early in a session, for instance. This means I wind up typing out certain commands verbatim more often than I would in real life. Now, once I've used something once or twice I'll flip back in the history a line or two where appropriate, but that's about it. In real life, I use things like ^U ^W and ^Y far more than I do in those recordings. Unfortunately, to truly capture how I normally work on things, I'd have to have it grab multiple windows in parallel. I don't normally drop out of my editor to run compilers. That's just something which happens for those "lessons".
  - qu4z-2 14y ago
    These days I "drop out" of my editor with C-z to run compilers/system tools. That way you don't lose your editor state, but you also get the full shell (reverse-i search, etc) for whatever other tasks you're doing. Just something that works for me; not sure if you've tried it. YMMV.
    - rachelbythebay 14y ago
      I suppose I could enable that while doing these recordings... or just use screen. Or hey, maybe I'll figure out the parallel recording situation and then it'll really be just like watching over my shoulder.

shubb 14y ago

It's intriguing to see how someone clearly very comfortable on unix works on the terminal.

rachelbythebay 14y ago
I'm actually holding back on some of the crazier bits so it doesn't seem to fly by. I don't use the reverse-i-search thing early in a session, for instance. This means I wind up typing out certain commands verbatim more often than I would in real life. Now, once I've used something once or twice I'll flip back in the history a line or two where appropriate, but that's about it. In real life, I use things like ^U ^W and ^Y far more than I do in those recordings. Unfortunately, to truly capture how I normally work on things, I'd have to have it grab multiple windows in parallel. I don't normally drop out of my editor to run compilers. That's just something which happens for those "lessons".
- qu4z-2 14y ago
  These days I "drop out" of my editor with C-z to run compilers/system tools. That way you don't lose your editor state, but you also get the full shell (reverse-i search, etc) for whatever other tasks you're doing. Just something that works for me; not sure if you've tried it. YMMV.
  - rachelbythebay 14y ago
    I suppose I could enable that while doing these recordings... or just use screen. Or hey, maybe I'll figure out the parallel recording situation and then it'll really be just like watching over my shoulder.