Coding live stream

I first heard about live streaming when I watched Dina Rodriguez hand lettering on Twitch.

I thought @Twitch is only for gaming, but then I discovered @lettershoppe https://t.co/jxNgNoI17v #lettering pic.twitter.com/4vAhOJAZKX

— Chiu-Ki Chan (@chiuki) January 17, 2016

But I wasn't sure what to do in front of a live audience, so I didn't do anything about it until I met Liam Spradlin at Google I/O. He started streaming after watching Dina, and encouraged me to try it, giving me lots of practical tips. There was a lot of code labs announced at Google I/O, so I thought, hey I want to do them anyway, why not live stream too?

Software

OBS, Open Broadcaster Software. Free, available in Windows, Mac and Linux.

Streaming service

restream.io: Stream to many places at the same time. I picked:

• YouTube
• Twitch
• livecoding.tv (added because of a tweet)

Layout

Here is how my desktop looked like during live stream:

My monitor resolution is 2560x1600, and I cropped the Display Capture to 1920x1080 so get the 16:9 aspect ratio. I popped out the chats from the 3 services so I can monitor them, but put them outside of the capture area so my audience won't see them.

I put the emulator outside as well, and declare it as a source in OBS so it is always visible, even when I type in Android Studio. If I want to hide it, I move it down in the list of sources in OBS.

The last source is my webcam. I cropped it to a square.

Here is how it looks like when I stream:

The emulator source is in the top right, and the webcam source is in the bottom right.

Preparation

• Click "Start Recording" in OBS to see what it captures, and adjust the microphone, webcam etc as needed.
• Set up the channels in restream.io, and copy the stream key to OBS.
• For each channel, set up archiving on the site itself e.g. YouTube.
• Set up OBS with the instructions from livecoding.tv: https://www.livecoding.tv/obs-guide
• Increase the font size of your browser and IDE.
• Try out a little bit whatever you plan to do while streaming. I was going to stream from my Linux box, but couldn't get the Android Wear N Preivew emulator going, so I had to switch to my Mac.
• Advertise multiple times before the live stream, and once again after you have started streaming.

Streaming

Keep an eye out on the chat windows when you stream. Live stream is much less fun without audience interaction! I say my reply out loud, but type links into the chat window so people can click on them.

Results

I trimmed the video to skip the initial part when I'm setting things up and waiting for people to show up.

People seem to like it!

Next

I'll try to stream once a month. I'll be announcing them on Twitter, and you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified of the recorded videos.