This article was originally posted on Patreon and has been brought over here to get all of the Pidgin Development/History posts into one single place.
I often get asked "Why do you stream Pidgin's development on Twitch?" and I figured it would be a good idea to have this formally documented somewhere...
For those of you that might not be aware I stream Pidgin's development live on Twitch at twitch.tv/rw_grim.
First a little history. I had casually watched Twitch starting somewhere in 2015 or 2016. I don't recall exactly, but somewhere around there. Generally I was just watching people playing Super Mario Maker and other video games that I enjoy.
Somewhere in late 2016 or early 2017 I finally discovered that people also programmed on Twitch. I watched a number of streams to get a feel for it and decided "I can do this!"
I felt I could bring something a bit different to Twitch at the time. I was an Open Source developer working on Open Source software that not only could the viewers contribute too, they could use that software as well.
My first Twitch stream was March 1st 2017. I don't recall what I worked on that day, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Pidgin. I was heavily working on Convey back then so it's most likely what it was. I spent a lot of time in the early streaming days working on Convey with a contributor that eventually became a competitor, but that's a story for another day.
I started simply with just a webcam. I didn't have a fancy microphone, a green screen, or fancy lighting, but I did have a stream motif that was styled around the movie Hackers. Overtime I would add a fancy microphone, and then a green screen with fancy lighting, and even upgrade all of those pieces at least once as well.
It took me a bit to get into the flow of things. Trying to think about your code, narrate what you're doing, and respond to chat is a lot of context switching, but eventually I just got used to it and I even find it hard to code without doing all those things now.
Many people think they're distracting me if they talk in chat, but that couldn't be any further from the truth. Having worked on an chat client for half my life, I spend a lot of time chatting while working and Twitch is no different. In fact, I get easily distracted by other things if I don't have something else to focus on and the asynchronous nature of chat helps keep that in check.
It's very easy for me to get distracted by social media, TV, news, etc while I'm working. What happens is I'll get stuck on a problem or just lose some motivation, and whoops there goes an hour or more to a distraction. This doesn't happen while I'm streaming on Twitch because, well I'm not going to dox my contacts on social media, I can't rebroadcast TV, and no one wants to watch me read the news on stream. Which means, I just get lots and lots of work done because I have a built-in distraction of chat.
It didn't take me too long to realize that Twitch would be a good way to show people that we were actively working on Pidgin 3 and just to promote the project in general. In late 2017 I started doing "Pidgin Night" on Thursday nights. Thursday night was chosen because traditionally Pidgin was almost always released on Thursday nights.
Pidgin Night was a guaranteed Pidgin development night and every hour or so I would give away Pidgin stickers to people all over the world. Eventually the sticker craze wore out so we don't really do any sticker giveaways at all anymore unless someone redeems one with channel points.
With this extra exposure to the project we did start picking up some more casual contributions as well. One of those casual contributors was recently promoted to Crazy Patch Writer, our first in a very long time.
There are all sorts of micro contributions that Twitch viewers provide as well. Whether it's typos, spelling errors, busted logic, or whatever these things help immensely. Also the viewers just being there on Twitch let's me Rubber Duck constantly, which actually leads to more thought out designs and less time wasted from implementing before I had a good enough grasp on the problem.
Back when I started, I used to stream three days a week, but that got walked back to two days awhile ago and that's kind of where it's going to remain for awhile. I've got a lot on my plate right now, so trying to dedicate another night to streaming is hard. I do try to jump on as often as possible but I still feel like I should be streaming more.
Also we're primarily doing Pidgin development now as well. I used to write a lot more golang on stream as we were working on Convey, building HGKeeper, and youtrack-import to get us off of our trac instance. But now with a milestone for a Pidgin 3 Alpha I feel really guilty working on anything except Pidgin.
What do you think? More streams, less streams, different content? Let me know!
I hope you're enjoying these posts! Remember they go live for patrons at 9AM CST on Mondays and go public at 12AM CST on Thursdays! If you'd like to support my work, you can join find a list of ways to do so here.
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