HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is watching livecoding streams an efficient way to learn coding?

11 points by jay_cc ↗ HN
Watching coding livestreams has the benefit that you see that experienced coders struggle as well, you will see the little tricks people use to polish/speed up their code and you can ask the streamer questions. But wouldn't you learn more in the same amount of time if you were working on a project yourself?

7 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 25.3 ms ] thread
KhalPanda
From my experience, I definitely learn the most by doing, not watching, reading or listening.

As long as you know enough to get started on <project>, then you can just look things up as you get stuck.

There is an element of "you don't know what you don't know" when you're new to some stuff, but as you gain experience, the effect is less.

jay_cc
The same goes for me as well - however I wonder what the motivation behind watching coding livestreams is in this case? There are some people on twitch that have multiple hundreds of viewers during the multi-hour (!) live coding sessions...
drdeca
I imagine it (on average) helps more than watching someone stream playing a videogame would, so if one gets the benefit of enjoyment in the same way from both, in roughly the same degree, then even a small benefit towards learning could be enough to tip the scales.

But that only applies if one is the sort of person that would get said enjoyment out of it.

In the general case, where one doesn’t get that, idk.

idkidkidkidk
When i was trying to get my first Java/Spring programming job, i enjoyed watching experienced devs show you walking around their local environment while debugging local issues which helped a lot,

But yea after you get familiar with your major tools, terminal, IDE, etc, i don't think viewing is a better experience. I still think a lot of tools that are extremely complex with tons of features, Intellij, AWS, it helps to see an experienced power user show you all the shortcuts/how they navigate.

Nowadays, when experimenting with a new tool, usually documentation and get-started-guides are most beneficial for me (text based not videos).

runawaybottle
Where did you get this idea? I think that will answer more of your own question than anything else.