I’ve spent some time recently thinking and discussing the idea of live-streaming coding sessions. It started with conversations with my brother about how there’s not really a Twitch TV for programming, but if there was I’d be really into that.

In a classic case of “The Simpsons Already Did It” a week after floating the original idea to start a pair-programming streamed show with Rob Cooper, Scott Hanselmen posted “Reality TV for Developers – Where is Twitch.tv for Programmers?”. At about the same time a new sub-reddit grew out of /r/programming called /r/WatchPeopleCode/ – the timing seemed a little too good to be true, so last Sunday I did a stealth trial run and mutely live-coded two hours of hacking on a random library I’ve been spiking. It was fairly dull stuff, but about 80 people came and went over the duration of two hours.

That’s enough of an audience for now. I love writing software, and I love pairing, so earlier today I got together with Chris Bird and we streamed our first “live-on-air code kata”. It clocks in at about two hours, and was fun to put together. Time allowing, I’m going to aim to put one or two of these together a week, ideally sticking to a ping-pong-pairing with conversation format.

Here’s the YouTube recording of the pilot “Cutting CODE!” stream, where we build an image to ASCII art converter in two hours, entirely driven by tests.