Getting your set-up ready for streaming dev rel

Joe Nash: Joe Nash is with me. I'm Matthew Reveldt. I should say that as well. Hello, Joe. How are you doing?

Speaker 2: I'm doing great. Thanks. How are you? Yeah.

Joe Nash: I'm I'm very well, actually. Thanks. Thank you very much for joining me. Whereabouts in the world are you right now?

Speaker 2: Well, as you can tell by my beautiful background, I'm in Amsterdam. I have no idea if it looks like that outside right now because I can't leave my house like everyone else.

Joe Nash: It is a shame, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 2: So much having me.

Joe Nash: Oh, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Sorry. I I got distracted there by by audio problems.

But, anyway, so I'm in I'm in Shropshire in England in in case you're interested. And one of the things that we're gonna do hey, Jeremy. Hello on the chat. I understand from watching Twitch streams. I meant to say hello to people who say hello on the chat, so there you go.

Anyway, seriously, what we're gonna talk about is this whole streaming thing, which is becoming more and more important right now that we're unable to travel, most of us, during the pandemic. And yet developer relations still goes on, and a lot of DevRel people are turning to streaming, turning to video, and other online content. And, Joe, you are someone who's done quite a lot of streaming as well as DevRel. And today, I I thought we should go through the basics of what you need to get set up and and started. So, Joe, what what's your I wanna hear two things, I suppose.

One is what's your technical kind of recommendations, but also Sure. What sort of content do you think works? So let's start with the the the technical side of things. What do you need to do for the basics to get set up doing this?

Speaker 2: Sure. So I think before I get into that, I wanna talk a little bit about my background for streaming because I think that informs technology choices a little bit. So one of the weird things well, I guess not weird. One of the things that's very particular to video streaming at the moment is that, obviously, a lot of the, I guess, state of the art and the techniques is driven by the rich community, which means it's driven by gamers, basically. So a lot of what you're gonna be finding in terms of tooling and equipment is gonna have all very gaming centric messages.

So if you're looking for, like, I guess, kind of more tame language around video production, you might sometimes struggle to find the tools or the equipment that you're looking for if you're not in the mind of the fact that they're probably trying to service the Twitch audience. So I'm gonna be talking about a company called Elgato a lot, they are a great example of this. They are a hardware company that just solely produces hardware for Twitch streamers, and they make really incredible products. Both me and Matthew are using Elgato products right now, I think, actually. I'm literally surrounded by them.

And so I've become a bit of a Elgato fanboy. But also on the software side, a lot of the and this is like Matthew and I were talking about a little bit earlier. A lot of the more usable tools are now coming out of the needs of Twitch streamers. So I guess I wanna I wanna preface with that. So I got into streaming because of gaming.

I am a Twitch affiliate, which is a fancy way of saying I have more than zero viewers. Not at all, but I have many viewers. And so because of that, I had a lot of the setup already, which has then been very helpful for video production work for some of people at. So fundamentally, you basically need two things. The OBS open broadcast suite.

Is that what it stands for? That's what it stands for. It sounds OBS,

Joe Nash: isn't it?

Speaker 2: Yeah. It sounds roughly in the ballpark. OBS and a decent camera and decent microphone. And anything else than that, such as the green screen, am obviously using. And it's my hand that goes out of my green screen.

And so from such as the green screen and the lights and that kind of thing are all just kind of they're nice to have, but they things you could build up over time. And some of this some of the equipment that streamers use can be a little bit pricey. So if you're streaming at home for yourself and your company's not paying for this equipment, it's definitely a collection that you can build up over the time. So, yeah, I guess we should start by talking about OBS. I think that makes sense.

Cool. Awesome. Okay. So OBS is basically a video production suite, I guess. It's sole use it's just streaming.

It's great for any kind of, like, managing multiple scenes and video. Like, you can record. It's really good for if you're recording screencast as well because you can have multiple scenes and hot keys to change between them, so you can have your coder to open and then your slides and that kind of thing. And it's free and open source, which is where we kind of get into the the ease of use situations. There are some kind of newer forks of OBS that are being developed by companies.

Streamlabs is one of them, which is a version of OBS that's aimed at game streamers. And basically, all they've done is they've taken OBS and they've made the UI a lot nicer, essentially, and a lot more usable. So if you're kind of getting it for the first time and you aren't massively excited by twiddling the knobs and dials on video production software, Starting off with Streamlabs is probably gonna be a far better way to get started. And if you are especially if you're doing this individually rather than as a company, Streamlabs has a lot of features built in to help you monetize your channel. So obviously, particularly here on Twitch, people do this to make a a livelihood, and there are some ways that you can monetize on Twitch, such as donations, such as people subscribing, and Streamlabs comes with a lot of kind of, like, neat toys out of box for that.

But within OBS, there's a couple of things you're gonna wanna look at, particularly if you are guesting on stuff. So if you're not just producing the stream yourself, if you are going on if you are speaking at conferences, if you are using your camera in different places. So right now, I'm on your Zoom, Matthew, and I'm actually a guest on on your show. I have a green screen running, and that's not using, for example, Zoom's virtual background. I'm actually sharing my camera from OBS.

So on my on my machine right now, I have OBS running with a chroma key for this, basically, detecting my green screen, and then I'm sending OBS as a camera to Zoom. So even if you're, like, joining other people's video feeds, you can, like, dress up your own camera. And just being a video production software, OBS has lots of features for filtering your audio and putting nice audio filters on your microphone or for making adjusting the lighting on your camera. So even if you're not using a green screen, running your camera through OBS can help heighten the visuals a little bit. However, as some of the experiences we've had today, there is a big disparity between OBSs on different platforms.

And there's a couple of big gotchas. The biggest gotcha is an audio one. So right now, for example, the situation we're in, Matthew is running OBS and Zoom on his machine, and OBS is taking the audio input well, it should be taking the audio from Zoom. So my microphone going into Zoom coming out on Matthew's machine, OBS should then pick that up. On Mac, OBS cannot capture the desktop audio.

So on Windows, that would just work by default. It would just catch capture the sound, and you're good to go. On Mac, it can't by default. You need another piece of software to provide that audio routing to capture the audio from wherever it is you want the the sound to be and to pipe that into OBS. So today, we're using Loopback by Rogue Amoeba, which I actually first encountered because I was using it to mix audio for my Dungeons and Dragons game, but it's also a fantastic tool for this kind of stuff.

And this is what it's what it's really made for. But there's also a couple of other free pieces of software around there. So, yeah, audio is definitely one of the big platform specific things. The other one is that whole virtual camera Shindig I just spoke about. So that's enabled via a plug in called OBS Virtual Cam, which just makes an option available for OBS to output to a camera.

And then in Zoom, you just select your camera instead. So I can just go to and accidentally mute myself. I go to Zoom right now and just change it to my normal camera, and this would all disappear. But right now, it's set to virtual cam. Then I plug in this Windows only, so you cannot do this on Mac easily.

There is a piece of software called CamTwist, which is one of those pieces of software that I'm sure it's fine. It looks great, but, like, you go to the website and gives you, like, kind of weird spyware vibes. I would you what? Weird spyware vibes. Oh.

Like, it's just like certain pieces of software. You go to their website, and it's just like, oh, I'm not putting that on my machine. And Countertwist is one of those. So there is a current solution to this in the works. The CEO of Shopify, Toby, I think it's Toby, recently put up a bounty, I think, of $15,000 for someone to make an equivalent of the virtual cam Windows plug in for Mac OBS.

And that's well well underway. If you go to the OBS GitHub right now, you can find the RFC that resulted from that bounty, and there's already a downloadable proof of concept for it. It does require you to build OBS from source, but there is already proof of concept there for it. So I guess the long and short of what I'm saying is this is kind of another net result of the background of streaming and what has pushed the state of the art in streaming, which is predominantly things that are better on Windows than they are on Mac. Gaming, video production well, video production is good on Mac.

I don't know why that one's wrong. But, yeah, gaming mainly. So OBS on Mac is a little bit of a worse harder situation than it is on Windows. It's a point. Go on.

Joe Nash: Sorry. I was gonna say, for for a lot of what we're doing in DevRel, it's probably you're probably gonna be totally fine with Mac. Right? I mean, you might have to buy loopback, which is $99. Yep.

You might have to maybe there are a couple of things you do differently. And also, as we've seen when we're setting up, maybe it crashes a bit on Mac. Yeah. But it's it's holding up so far. Yeah.

But, like, if you if you wanna have, like, a code window, like, a terminal here, a web browser here, and, you know, visual pseudo code here, and then your face hovering somewhere, you can do that, right, on a Mac?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That's totally doable. It just takes a little bit more setup and potentially more software as we know it. But other than that, it's it's totally doable.

The only other consideration, and this is gonna vary depending on what your your product and what your code stream is, is streaming is a computational intensive task, especially on the GPU side. There are reason different reasons this matters. So first of all, it's just gonna slow your machine down. So when you look at game streamers, for example, they will not play the game on the same machine that they are streaming from. They will have two machines, one which is their gaming machine, and they're piping the video output from that machine to a second machine, which is then the stream machine.

So if you are something which is computationally intensive, I don't know, maybe you're the the most everyday example I could think of where this would matter is, like, maybe you're live streaming a big code base of a compiled language and it actually makes a material difference to how fast it compiles. I don't know. But more I guess there's other things where, like, you're doing machine learning stuff, which is using the GPU to run models and maybe that could be impacted by the stream. But just in general, aware that, like, if it's the same machine you're streaming on, you are gonna see a reduction in performance. If you do decide to go down the route of, like, oh, I hey.

I've got two laptops. I wanna stream from one to the other. It's actually super easy. Well, this is more of a hardware thing, but we can get onto that in a minute. Super easy.

Thanks to companies like Elgato who makes little hardware devices. This little cute thing. This is the HD 60 s stream card. HDMI on one end, HDMI on the other end. You just it will make video output go between machines so you can stream on a different computer.

So as long as you've got a machine somewhere and you've got a machine with a HDMI output, you can use a dual machine setup. The other probably the more full reason it matters is your audio quality, particularly if you don't have a good mic and if you aren't quite sure how to filter audio or you find that difficult. Because if you do run this on one machine alongside your Versus code and what all the other electron apps I'm sure you're running, that fan is gonna kick in and to come through on the stream pretty easily. So that's the other compelling reason to get the the stream tool on a different on different machine. But, yeah, functionally, especially if your first, like, attempts at it, it's it's totally fine.

Joe Nash: Cool. Thanks. So are we okay to move on to hardware?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think so.

Joe Nash: Yeah. Because I know we're gonna Tom do O and George Castro are gonna do a big OBS session next week.

Speaker 2: Great. Cool.

Joe Nash: I mean, it's good to cover it now, but, you know, let's Yeah. That's awesome. So in terms of hardware, like, you mentioned microphones and so on. You mentioned the the Elgato Lite that I've got up there. Yeah.

I've got the stream on thingy. So let me let me turn off the light and and show you the difference. Right?

Speaker 2: Oh, actually. That'd be fine.

Joe Nash: So

Speaker 2: If I turn off the lights, bring the red screen.

Joe Nash: It's not too much different, but you can see it looks it looks worse. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So and then here's the thing.

Right? So I've webcams. Logitech c nine two two, I think, or C nine twenty.

Speaker 2: It's C nine twenty. Yep. This is the

Joe Nash: the camera. Right? But Yeah. On the Mac, it looks terrible by default.

Speaker 2: Interesting.

Joe Nash: So let let me go on to just the default settings, and you will see that there's not only does it pick up the flicker from my lights above my LED lights because it's set up for American frequencies instead of European. But also, it it just looks really washed out. So Yeah. And also, it's it's not zoomed. So, that.

Yep. There's that. So you see all the junkies, see my printer, see my curtain Yep. Stuff like that. But there's this other thing as well, which backlight compensation, which just again, washes it out a bit.

Speaker 2: Washes it out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So working back.

This I guess this is like I think what you're hitting on is, like, something that's really key to kind of also what we've spoken about so far, which is, like, there is a kind of weird set and actually, it's very key to what someone just said in the chat. There is a kind of default accepted set of hardware tools now that everyone uses. So the Logitech c nine twenty webcam is, like, the one that gets recommended. OBS is the software that gets recommended. The microphone I'm using, which is a Yeti Blue or Blue Yeti, I think Yeti Blue, is like one of the best microphones.

But as has been observed, I did nothing with my audio setup before joining this this livestream today. I just set the I set the microphone up and did it, and it probably sounds not great. Because even when you have the best hardware for the job, it still needs especially when it comes to audio and video, they still need to be adjusted for your particular surroundings. So lighting is a great one where, like, I'm in a dimly lit room with one window. If I don't have this light on, I'm gonna look pretty terrible, but more importantly, I'm using a green screen.

If I don't have my key light, for your set for your setting, the light right now is, like, purely just to make things look a little bit better. Right? Whereas if I don't properly light my green screen, it just full on won't function. And with my audio, this is a pretty big room and I don't have any dampening or anything around me. So I'm gonna be picking up a bit of an echo, especially because I'm trying to hide the microphone.

I don't have it directly in front of my face. Right? So having configurable hardware and software is one of the great things at Logitech with that camera in particular. Do you have the the Logitech?

Joe Nash: I do, but I I bought something called webcam settings panel out of the Mac App Store, and that that's given me so much more access to settings on the camera, which I think are available by default on Windows. But yeah. Because I I was asking people, why why do people recommend the c nine twenty camera when it's so terrible? What I didn't realize was that actually the default settings are terrible.

Speaker 2: Right. And actually, my mind's giving a great showcase right now. One of the default settings on the c nine twenty is autofocus, and it will, like, do weird things occasionally and just go out of focus if I move in a particular way. And this is like with my setup, it's all a bit out of whack because I haven't done anything for a while. And even every time I like like for this, it's been a week since I livestreamed, and it still took me half an hour to set up the green screen.

For, like, things like audio and video setup, like, once you've got it tuned the way that, you know, works if you're room and you're doing it, like, repetitively, you'll it'll it'll get better over time for sure. Sorry. I was reading the comments out of the sound. I'm not actually shouting, Beau. This is just how loud I normally talk.

I'm so sorry. But, yes, the directional microphone is a good shout. So the reason I have an omnidirectional microphone, again, this comes down to the background of what I was kinda saying, which is I don't like, I'm not just usually sitting at my desk looking at a screen when I stream. Like, sometimes I'm playing games. In particular, my my old game livestream had a lot of VR, and so I'm not always directly in front of my mic, which is why I have an omnidirectional mic.

And also, I use this mic for recording multiple people speaking at the same time. So, again, to go to the other nontechnical example, when we play Dungeons and Dragons, sometimes we record and we use this microphone. So that's why I have an omnidirectional mic. But if you know that you are gonna be in a fairly fixed setup, a a directional microphone or even like a lapel microphone or like even a decent gaming headset that has a good microphone are totally valid choices. But you're I made this particular choice, Sorry.

Joe Nash: Sorry. I'll say if you got the Blue Yeti, you can set it to the cardioid setting, which You can. Yeah. Then directional, which is what I'm using now.

Speaker 2: Which is that setting? I don't know if that made any material difference to, how I sound right now.

Joe Nash: But then you've got you've also got the the Logitech g hub where and the Blue hub as well where you can you can change the audio filtering. Yep. It's one of the reasons I got this because I've got a mixing desk with a an XLR mic, and I thought, I don't wanna get that out every time. So having a software audios is great.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's all you can do that. You can make the audio as well in OBS. And I used to have, a bunch of, like, filters and whatever for this microphone in particular, set up on OBS, which I don't have in the scene I'm currently using. Right now, I'm talking to you for Zoom anyway, so I wouldn't have it.

Jeremy just made a good point about the cameras, which is he has the Logitech StreamCam, and it's a marked improvement from the series we've been talking about. Okay. This the c nine twenty series is like a really old series of webcams now. Like, they've kind of like, I guess they're still making new models on it. Yeah.

But, yeah, they they seem to be staples, but I'm sure there's more advanced things out there.

Joe Nash: So Charlie asked about kind of sound dampening, and Yeah. I'm not really a tapestry person. So I'm not gonna get a tapestry on the wall in front of me. Right?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Joe Nash: But, also, I don't wanna stick egg boxes up or whatever because this is a working office. You know?

Speaker 2: It's not Right.

Joe Nash: Right. Right. Have a studio as such. Yeah. Do you have any recommendations?

I mean, do do you have bits of material hanging up or foam or something?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So this is actually one of the the benefits of, like, this is a kind of dual benefit of having a green screen. Is that, like, it's already reduced. It's cut this room in half for me right now. It's considerably more echoey when I'm not using my green screen.

And then other than that, changing your mic type. So lapel mics are perfectly fine. I cannot use the lapel mic, thanks to the volume of my beard. It's a bit of a problem when you're at a desk and you keep whacking your lapel mic. But yeah, changing the mic type is a is a great one.

And yeah, especially like, I'm in a rental situation. So I also can't stick sound dampening panels all over the walls. So yeah, it's bit of a tricky one. One of the things that I've seen people do, which I'm still not sure whether it's extreme or not. So this is a type of hardware we haven't spoken about.

Everything on my desk is on an arm. So this is on a microphone arm, my monitor's on an arm. And the reason for the monitor is a lighting thing, which I'm gonna talk about in a moment. But I have seen people make tents across their arms. So, like, my monitor arm is here.

My microphone arm is there. I'm just draping a blanket between those two to kind of box it all in is something that I have seen done. You look slightly unhinged. It definitely works. So, yeah, the the arm thing actually, while I'm on that, one of the having movable things for your lighting setup and your sound setup is really useful.

In particular, sometimes, and it's not happening today, I don't know why. Sometimes my monitor picks up the reflection of my green screen, so the green shines off my monitor, and then see this little light patch on my forehead, sometimes that will be particularly shiny and will catch the reflection of my monitor, and so my forehead will become a green screen and I will get a big hole in my face. And so when that happens, it's great to just get to push my monitor away a bit or adjust the angle of it and that kind of thing. The positioning of your webcam is also super useful. So having that webcam on an arm.

So right now, my arm is positioned right above my screen. So if I was doing like a coding livestream, I'd always kind of be looking roughly where the audience, I guess, is. So having movable components is also super great. Lots of coders now are using ultrawides as the new fad. They're like monitor arms from ultrawides is terrifying because these are big monitors and these arms do not look like they can hack it.

Dell have the Dell monitor arm. They do not actually officially, like, assign their ultrawide models to that monitor arm. But if you go to any Dell showrooms or you go to a Dell booth at a conference, they will be using that monitor arm for their monitors, and that's what I'm using. And it's big enough. I've got one of the big thick Dells, not as nice as the Samsung ones.

So if you've got a Visa compatible big monitor, I'd recommend the Dell monitor arm. It does seem to cope with it. Okay.

Joe Nash: Nice. Okay. Cool. Yeah. I so Laurent and Jeremy mentioned bath towels and going into closets and stuff like that.

You Yeah. If you're doing audio only work, you can buy

Speaker 2: Boots.

Joe Nash: Sound booths. And one thing I'm probably gonna do is is put a blanket down on on the desk because that'll re you know, that refracts some sound. Certainly. But I think even for audio work, it'd be good to you know, if no one's seeing you, you can stick your head in a box.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's

Joe Nash: also good for this sort of situation.

Speaker 2: Sorry. I'm misapplying to people.

Joe Nash: Oh, okay.

Speaker 2: Cool. Yeah. Also, I don't know if you can can you hear this keyboard? Yeah. Yeah.

Cool. Mechanical keyboards for livestreams. Terrible idea. Put away your mechanical keyboard. Get out your soft Bluetooth phone.

Far better.

Joe Nash: So alright. We've spoken a bit about hardware and stuff like that. One of the things that I think is really important is is the actual content, clearly. You know, it's it's fine. Oh, Beo mentions the RTX, which you were Yeah.

Speaker 2: So

Joe Nash: earlier. Let's talk about that.

Speaker 2: Beo, I I have that. I've I've okay. So background on this. NVIDIA made some new graphics cards, RTX. They the difference between them and the previous graphics cards is they have these special calls for AI, basically.

Other than that, the performance is basically identical to, the ten eighty t I range, essentially. They are desperate to sell these very, very, very expensive graphics cards whose price will blow out the rest of your computer. Very desperate to sell these graphics cards. So they've started to release apps that use them. So they've just released this app called RTX Voice, which is it uses AI and it uses the calls on this graphics card to noise to, like, automatically suppress background noise.

And there is this wild video of a Twitch streamer who is sitting like I am now with one of those, like, big desktop fans. In fact, I've got one of these, at his face on whilst banging a hammer on the desk, and you can't hear anything but his voice crystal clear. It is wild. So it transpires that that app is actually usable if you don't have an RTX graphics card. So the older NVIDIA chips still have, processing cores on them that aren't for graphics that they have CUDA cores.

And the CUDA cores will attempt to run the RTX audio package. All you have to do is when you install when you go to install RTX audio, it will it will say it can't install, but it will unpack all the files. So you then just go into the files and you you open a particular file and remove a section which basically says don't install, and then you rerun the installer and it works. So I have done that. Let me change the RTX audio.

Oh, I'm on the RTX audio. I'm actually on the RTX audio now. So in theory, this should be background dampened. I it doesn't seem to work very well for me. And that's probably because I'm on a laptop that has an NVIDIA GPU, but it's not a super great one.

So I think your mileage will vary. But, it is really interesting. Like, if you've got an art if you've got machine with RTX, you should 100% be using it. If you've got machine with a good NVIDIA graphics card, you should 100% try it. It my performance is definitely not as miraculous.

Like, you can probably hear this, which like you definitely wouldn't have been able to if that other video is to be believed. Yeah. It's really exciting because setting up like the noise gates to do the background noise filtering yourself, where I used to stream was an apartment in London, and we just like we were on a main road, and it was an absolute nightmare where, like, I had to have I spent so long just trying to get, like, a bearable audio setup. So that piece of software works. It'll be a miracle.

Thank you for raising that.

Joe Nash: Cool. Hello, Minton. Also okay. So I was gonna ask some questions about it, but let's let's move on. Yeah.

Alright. So Twilio did a game show.

Speaker 2: Cool.

Joe Nash: I don't know if you saw it. A quiz show on Twitch. I should. Other people are doing live coding. People are doing lecture series.

All sorts of things going on. What does Twitch, in particular, lend itself to when it comes to developer relations, would you say?

Speaker 2: Great question. I've spent a super long time just in my career in general obsessing about this. So if anyone watching who doesn't know me, basically, that I've done in my career has been based in hackathons in one way or another. And so a really early question that came up for me was like, what is the viewable form of a hackathon? Right?

Like, hackathons are great to participate in. They there's no spectatable form of a hackathon. Right? Like, you can't go to hackathon as a guest and, like, sit around and lurk. Maybe you come for the final demos, but, like, even that's kind of weird.

So like what is like, I guess what I was calling it was like the esportsification of coding. Like, we play games at home and for some reason now hundreds of thousands of people watch people play games. Like, how do we get to that transition from coding? And I think this is definitely something that people are struggling with with DevRel, but also just, like, con like, coding content in particular. I think it takes a very particular kind of person to sit and watch and enjoy a coding livestream.

Like, I can't even watch video tutorials about code, let alone a livestream because I get, like, I just wanna skip through to the information I need and get out of that, like, content. Right? I wanna get back to it. And in with Twitch in particular, what you see a lot of is very binary activity. If you get people who are really actively in chat, like trying to interact with the streamer and like they're donating to get them to read stuff and that kind of thing.

Or you have people the vast majority of people, I think, my I don't have any stats that is up, but my tuition is the vast majority of people have a long running stream on in the background. Twitch definitely seems to lend itself well to longer running content that people can kind of jump in at any point and kind of be up to date with where they are, which obviously with live coding is again quite difficult. Like, if you jump into a coding stream halfway through and you catch up to where they are. There are some really great live coding streams. Suze Hinton, Noob Cat or No Op Cat, I guess it would actually be.

Her stream is fantastic. And also, Soos has a really good blog post about her live streaming setup on her median, which I would really recommend reading. So clearly, can work. But, yeah, as you said, there's definitely people experimenting with it and trying to make it more viewable. My favorite example of this is an organization called Battlesnake, where they it's kind of a hackathon, but instead of like building a generic product, you're building a AI for the game of snake.

So think like Nokia snake. You're building an AI for a game of snake and then basically you build that throughout time. And what the the streamed portion of it is is like televised and shout casted tournaments basically. So they have a like, they'll have a tournament and they'll get eight of these AIs, they'll load them up, and then they will have like actual commentators coming on and commenting about, like, the snake's behavior and what kind of things they're seeing and what what decisions the snake AI is making. And it's really, really good.

And it's like one of the closer things to a viewable coding thing I think I've ever seen. But I guess all this is to say that I don't actually think there is any solved answers here yet. Right? Like, we haven't as an industry cracked the esportsification of technical content. There are some people who want tutorials, but, like, following along with a Twitch tutorial is all of the worst things about workshops amplified.

Like, you can't be helped by the instructor. You can't there's a big delay on Twitch streams between, like, stuff coming up. Cone in the dark is a great example. That's in the chat. Cone in the dark is another very viewable format.

I haven't seen it really work on stream yet, but in person, it's a super viewable format. But yeah. So, like, you can't really be helped by the instructor. If you ask a question in chat, it's gonna be, like, there's a big delay between chat and live. So it's not gonna be answered in a useful amount of time.

For the instructor, there's, like, potentially exponential amount of people there. So I think instructional live coding is probably never gonna reach the numbers that we would hope it will. Obviously, Microsoft and Channel nine are doing some really interesting things here and trying to make it work. And I know AWS has been doing some stuff as well. But hearing Twilio doing a game show is really interesting.

So I think the entertainment aspect is probably more where stuff needs to go. So, like, Twilio used to this thing called Hacker Olympics, which was like a series of kind of technically adjacent small technically adjacent games. Like, use technical skills, but, like, weren't just sitting down a coding. That kind of thing for a Twitch stream, like more of a game show, like a technical game show is much more compelling to me than watching a live coding stream. But as I said at the beginning, I am on this super ducony to watch a video.

I have a friend who not only watches Sue Sinton's livestream, but like, typically concentrates and participates for the duration, which is like multiple hours on a weekend. And I cannot imagine me myself being able to engage with a livestream of that in that way. But so I think it's there's definitely very varied audience types on this. And I think a successful channel is gonna use is gonna have content for that bridges these different device.

Joe Nash: Yeah. And and I guess, naturally, in DevRel anyway, you'd be doing different things in person. And, you know, you you go to conference, you don't necessarily only stand on stage and speak all the time. You know?

Speaker 2: There's a Right. Right.

Joe Nash: I think now it's it's quite interesting because Twitch feels like you know, you can look at Twitch and just think, well, it's just the same old medium that we've had for a long time. But it's not. It's its own thing. Right? I think if you go back and look at the early television broadcasts, you know, there'd be someone very formally dressed sitting there going, hello.

Welcome to Yeah. The BBC. And and now we feel like we understand what television is. That looks really weird. I think maybe we'll we'll come back and see what we're doing now with Twitch and perhaps think some of that's weird.

Speaker 2: The the specifics of Twitch that you brought up there is really interesting because there's one area that I actually think is probably has really interesting short term benefits that I haven't really seen explored yet. So Twitch has a really good developer ecosystem that a lot of the games use. So for example, there is a plug in for card games. So not I'm not talking like poker and that kind of thing. I mean, like trading card games like Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, Magic Gathering.

But if you are watching someone play one of those games via, like, a virtual version, so for for example, like, via Magic the Gathering Arena, which is a gamified version of Magic the Gathering, the add on will read the cards off of the stream and will, like, give you information about them. So because when you're when you're when you're watching that stream, the the player may be playing really quickly. It may be a card went past and it's got loads of text that describes what it does and you don't get a chance to see it. And you wanna know like, oh, why what was that card that played that stream it just played? And so this add on will catch that card and be like, hey, that that streamer just played this.

And you can click on it. You can go like you as the person watching the stream now on Twitch can click on the stream where that card is and it will open like more information for you within the UI. It's really cool. And what's interesting is that I haven't seen a lot of basic, like developers doing like development on Twitch pick up on this. So the the killer app that, like, has been in my mind, I hope they make is Repl.

Repl. It recently made, like, the product to open any GitHub repo basically instantly within Replit. So Replit is like an online cloud hosted dev environment essentially. So you can go to it. You can set up with your repo so that someone who wants to contribute to your product comes to your repo, clicks one button that's in your read to me, and now they have a full dev environment ready to go and they just do what they wanna do and then it gets committed.

Like, why isn't this on Twitch? Like, why can't I go to someone's live coding stream and just straight away say like, oh, I wanna, like, run what they're running, click a button, and just have their dev environment set up and ready to go. Right? Like and that's so doable with the Twitch dev ecosystem. And, like, it's already things of that scale have already been done by developers for all of these games.

And like, they would instantly lift up all of this coding content and actually make it interactive and far more consumable. And again, this is something that people are playing with. Susan Hinton on her livestream has live coded Twitch apps for her stream. So maybe she maybe someone is there by now. I just aren't aware of it.

But it's yeah. Super, super, super good idea. Right. It's not super good idea rather, so I got distracted by chat. Super fertile territory, I think, as well in using the Twitch developer ecosystem to make some of these these things that we're doing with Twitch work.

And it's also right in the domain of like hacky stuff that as DevRel people were all very into, like doing a Twitch API mash up with your company's product to add more functionality to your stream. Like, again, like to go to Twilio, like the things you could do with just integrating SMS with the Twitch functionality to, make things happen on the stream, like, would be very enriching for the audience who are there, and then also actually, like, demonstrate the product in a cool way. So I think there's a if you're gonna be using Twitch for a dev, I'll definitely look at whether there's any implications from the Twitch platform that and your API.

Joe Nash: What do you so what do you reckon to non Twitch platforms? You've got Mixer from Microsoft, which, you

Speaker 2: know Yep.

Joe Nash: Is very, I guess, Xbox heavy right now, but I'm sure you could use it for other stuff. You've got YouTube live, obviously. The the audience is definitely different between between the two the three platforms. Yeah. Do think do you think there's a critical mass with Twitch enough?

And I'm talking about DevRel stuff specifically.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Joe Nash: Or is it worth experimenting with with YouTube Live as well?

Speaker 2: I think, ultimately, there's no reason not to be using multiple platforms. Like, it's it's technically trivial to rebroadcast across multiple platforms at the same time. Where it gets difficult is in actually interacting with those audiences. So if you're just doing, like, purely a I'm throwing my content out into the world. I'm gonna be my content will be live on this platform at x or y time.

Like, cross streaming to all of them is, like, super reasonable. But then if you wanna be answering chat like we're doing, or if you want to be like, if you wanna do these integrations and that kind of thing, you do kind of need to pick a platform, or you need to have a big moderation team who's gonna be acting across all of them. I don't have a lot of opinions across the platforms. I ultimately think that we are seeing like a arm traces isn't the right word, but like okay. So I look at Mixer, for example.

Like Mixer bought a bunch of the big Twitch streamers and I incentivize them to change platform. Right? Like, I think right now, there is a competitive environment that will, at some point, seed a winner. Like, don't think, like the cloud ecosystem, that all three of these platforms will continue to fight for this crown indefinitely. I think at some point, one of them is gonna and knowing Google, it will be them.

He will give you just like dump that product into the ocean. But I think at one point, a clear answer on this will emerge. Twitch is right now the clear leader. But again, it's all gaming adjacent. And there has been I hope this isn't a controversial statement, but the gaming community and being adjacent to the gaming community has its own perils, especially for moderation.

And there has been the case where, like, a big non gaming related thing like a coding livestream has made it to the Twitch front page, and the chat has been flooded with, people who have no idea what this is, and there's been inappropriate behavior pretty quickly. So finding a quieter platform can actually have its advantages. Twitch is very much there to prompt and promote discovery, but, like, if that's not amongst an audience that's beneficial to your business, that's not useful for you. Right? So, yeah.

I don't know. For coding, I don't know if there's a clear winner. Twitch has the advantage just because that's where people stream. But, yeah, I don't know if it makes much difference.

Joe Nash: I mean, I I think the thing I like about YouTube, because I I I mean, I did I remember when they first brought out Hangouts on there, and you could Right. You know, live livestream Hangouts effectively. And we used do that a lot in the Ubuntu world, and it wasn't a stream. It was just a live video. What what I mean by that is there's all those cultural things that come with a strict Twitch stream weren't there.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Nash: It was just YouTube, but it happened to be happening right there and then. So I think there are there are benefits to that. Yeah. And Jeremy mentioned, you know, like, Discord and things like that. And yeah.

I mean, I would say we're probably coming to the point where we need to wrap up. But, I mean, is is it worth looking at how do you how do you moderate and make sure that you have a a good participant experience for Yeah. Livestream DevRel. Do have any thoughts on

Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So first of all, thank you for bringing up Discord, Jeremy. Jeremy knows that I'm a big fan of Discord at the moment precisely because this is a really interesting thing.

Although a lot of the game gaming harbors some terrible dark pockets and corners, that means that tools built for gaming have fantastic moderation, such as Discord and also such as Twitch. So if you aren't gonna be using Twitch, this just goes for any any platform where you should be where you expect then well, where there is a possibility of unexpected audience interaction. So this goes for just as much for Twitch as it does a conference stage. Right? Like, if you are hosting a conference, you should be on watch for someone heckling something inappropriate from the audience.

Right? Or like a speaker breaking the code of conduct. Right? It's exactly the same on Twitch. You need to have active, proactive moderation who is there to watch out for, like, code of conduct violations, whether they are from the speaker or from the the chat, and is there to deal with it.

So Twitch has really great moderation tools. You as a streamer can nominate moderators, get your colleagues in, give them the moderator permission, have them watch Twitch. There's so many tools. You can put the chat on slow mode. You can make the chat subscriber only, so many people who have paid money can talk.

You can there's like a bunch so many tools there that you can use to to calm the space down or to, like, keep it kind of productive. From the host side, it's a little bit more difficult. You'd have to have a, like, voice of god, like an actual producer kind of sitting there. So if you're organizing a conference over Twitch, for example, and, like, you haven't checked the slides in advance for some reason, inexcusable reason, but maybe this slide in the last minute. You wanna be having a a live producer, right, ready to cut off the video and audio stream, right, who is, like, able to to do that.

So the person who is, like, emceeing or is on camera isn't also simultaneously Twitch and doing video production. So there's, like, content moderation is a similar scale to a live event. It's just there are more tools. It's far easier to ban someone from a Twitch chat than it is from your event. Someone says something inappropriate, straight away, drop the ban, hammer on them, silence them, whatever it is, and they're out.

And Twitch has a new moderator view, which is new since I stopped video game training. If you're

Joe Nash: a bit. Oh, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2: How's it how's it now?

Joe Nash: Still bad. I mean, I'm amazed that my laptop is even coping with this because it is basically running on a piece of wet string instead of a CPU. So I'm gonna buy a new machine. But yeah.

Speaker 2: I will wait till things calm down.

Joe Nash: You're fine now. You're fine now.

Speaker 2: Great. Cool. Yeah. So I think we've kind of spoken enough about moderating. But yeah.

Moderate. Have it. Nominate moderators.

Joe Nash: Yeah. Well, that's one the things that, thanks, Jerry. That's one of things that we need, for DevRelk on Earth, and I'll segue seamlessly into that. Registrations are free. We're running a bunch of these meetups as we're calling them.

I mean, Twitch streams, let's let's be frank is what they are, over the weeks leading up to DevRelcon Earth. But DevRelcon Earth will be effectively a series of Twitch streams most likely every Tuesday and Thursday for about six weeks. And you can register at 2020.devrel.net for free, where you will then that's your key to getting notifications of the schedules and probably being invited to whatever back channel that we decide on, Discourse or Slack. And really, lot of this is the reason why we're doing these streams leading up is to experiment with what works well. But, yeah, look, Joe and everyone who joined us in the chat, thank you very much.

It's been really nice doing this, and I'm super impressed by the fancy OBS we've got going. I'm really sad that I have huge amounts of lag. Despite the fact, right, listen to this. Everything is being captured on my machine. You're perfect.

Even though it's still on my machine, and mine's all laggy and rubbish. What what how's that fair?

Speaker 2: You need a you need a separate stream machine, Matthew. That's that's the answer. Get get your Elgato HD 60 s going.

Joe Nash: Yep. Yep. I'll be, burning the credit card. Alright.

Speaker 2: Thank you That very was one thing about hardware I didn't say. I just wanna quickly throw in. Yeah. There are cheaper variants of all this hardware. This is the Elgato green screen, which is, like, the best made pop up banner in the world.

You can get a cheap, terrible green screen from Amazon that will do the job for £15. Same with these key lights, same with the stream cards, build up, like, you'll get something that looks a little bit less than optimal initially, but then you can build it up really quickly and easily.

Joe Nash: That what you've got behind you is a pop up a pop up banner. So it's not coming down from the ceiling.

Speaker 2: So we're DevRel people. Right? Yeah. So it's pop up. So we're DevRel people.

We live and die by pull up banners. Honestly, Elgato have innovated on the pull up banner. It's like a it's a system mechanism. So you can raise and lower it to every high. It comes it's its own carry case.

So, like, it falls down, but then, like, bolts up and, like, the stands for tracks. It's I want, like, actual conference banners made from this kind of design. It's a work of art. It's genuinely very good.

Joe Nash: Well, the audio is going again, which is clearly a signal that I need to get that Mac Mini have been looking at. Alright. Well, thank you again, and

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Joe Nash: Catch you all on the Internet somewhere. I'm now gonna do a screen transition. Goodbye.