 Wow. You guys are awesome. Well, thank you for being here. Thank you for attending my little lightning talk. Let me first start off by saying that everyone's journey is very unique. So some developers have a strong academic background such as a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, computer science. Some developers went to a coding boot camp, or some developers are completely self-taught. So whatever background that you come from, live streaming will only complement and elevate your skill. So as I share my journey of finding my voice and breaking into the tech industry myself, I will also share with you the top four benefits of being a live streamer who codes and how to improve my overall skills as a developer. So let's go ahead and get started. So from a young age, I've always had an interest in programming. I was always good with computers due to growing up with a dad who was a systems administrator for Sun Microsystems, if anyone knows who remembers that. I initially started out as a computer science major in college actually, so I really, really knew that I wanted to do this. But my dream got cut short because one of the teaching assistants told me that I should not be there, that I was not smart enough. And so I had been kind of battling a lot of feeling like an outcast for a while, and so that was kind of the nail in the coffin for me, and I was like, I'm changing majors, I'm not doing this anymore. And so I essentially left that dream behind because of that incident and proceeded to other avenues in my career. So fast forward, 10 years later, I want a website. I have been doing a lot of stuff with music journalism and metal deejaying, and I wanted that internet street cred. And so when I decided and started researching, building websites, I got that excitement to learn how to code again and learn how to program. And so essentially I go for round two, but instead of going after a computer science degree again, I teach myself how to code, I network in Philadelphia, I join a fellowship, shout out to Christina Deemer. And after a year and some change of studying and networking, I get my first ever dev job at Yikes, Inc. in Philadelphia in the summer of 2017. And so that was very just a very great moment for me. I remember dancing in my room. And so when I started my first ever dev job, I knew immediately that it was for me. It was just, I had a great feeling and I was enjoying my job every day, waking up happy. And so I knew that finally was where I belonged. But a few years later, the pandemic hits. And so we're all stuck at home, of course. But me being introvert wasn't really too bad for me. I was cool. But I still yearned for an opportunity to connect with people and to share my passion because, you know, everyone gets lonely at home. And so, enter Twitch. Twitch is a live streaming platform. And my siblings were streaming on Twitch at the time and I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna try it. And so I decided that I was going to create a live stream channel. My first ever stream happened February 23rd, 2021, last year. And so let's start to explore what kind of benefits that I experienced. Benefit number one, live streaming improves your ability to explain a problem and your solution. So when I first started out streaming on Twitch, I actually was a gaming channel. But then shortly after that, I realized that there was a pretty solid programming community on Twitch and that it could probably use my channel as an opportunity to improve my skills as a developer while connecting with others at the same time. So I don't feel so isolated at home. And plus, I really wanted to get better at JavaScript, especially with Gutenberg, you know, alive and well and, you know, being awesome. And so I began code streaming and it was very overwhelming. Coding while being on display forces you to basically talk through your thought process out loud and process feedback that you receive in real time, which is both helpful and for myself and for everyone watching me. And so usually the first thing that people would say when they would stop by my stream is, what are you working on? So whenever someone stopped by my stream and said that, I had to pause. I had to think about what I was doing in that moment. And I began explaining the problem that I was trying to solve. And more oftentimes than not, I'd realized that my approach was completely backwards and I ended up course correcting myself, thus saving time, time ultimately. And as you can imagine, the more that I explained what I was doing, the better my communication became, the higher my confidence became and the higher my quality of work as a developer became. Benefit number two, live streaming improves your ability to demo functionality and applications. So as a code streamer, I built websites and applications that mostly pertain to my interest. So far on stream, I've built a Twitch chatbot with in node that interacted with my viewers, a music recommender application in a react, a battle snake that competed with other programmers, battle snakes, in a react proxy application that served as a wrapper for a Spotify API. So I do a lot on stream. As you can imagine, I couldn't just explain what I was working on, without showing the application, assuming that my apps not currently broken at the time. I often find myself switching over to over to my apps UI and talking through a couple use cases that they'd be so the viewers will understand why they would use my application, and how they would use my application. And that was something that you could easily be asked of day to day in your, you know, life as a developer or on that engine on an engineering team in general. For instance, maybe build a new tool that makes all developers lives easier on the team, you're going to have to pitch that tool, you're going to have to show why it's useful and how to use it. And the fact that I was able to do that on the fly on stream, just made my demos at work at work much more comprehensive, more, more understandable and much more consolidated. Benefit number three, live streaming improves your documentation skills. So with each live stream, more and more people would stop by and say things like, wow, it's really nice to see a black woman doing code. I'm inspired. Or just want to say hi, I'm coding alongside you. Or I've been thinking about getting in a dev myself and seeing you was really cool. Or, hey, you're missing a semi colon on line 32. That's going to solve your error. I felt myself coming in to my own and it was a great feeling. But then people started to ask if I could share my GitHub repository for my code. And my first instance was no, my code sucks. But I realized that they want to see my progress and that it's just helpful to share your code, especially if people are looking at it and watching your program. And so once I got over that tiny insecurity, I figured that if I'm going to be sharing my code, they should at least have a read me a file that explains what's in your repo, how it works, what you need to get it up and running locally. A lot of my viewers are aspiring developers, or they're established developers who are familiar with the language that I'm working in. And so having this read me having documentation to my code that I was casually working on a stream is only helpful. And as you can imagine, that translates directly to my day to day. The quality of my code comments is really good these days. I'm able to recognize when I need to add something to my read me. And even if I need to create a flow chart to make my other developers lives easier, ultimately. In the final benefit, live streaming makes you a hot commodity in the tech industry. So I came up on a year of streaming. And that's when I decided to enter the job market. When I entered the job market, I didn't know how much more of a valuable developer I'd become over the past year alone. A lot of companies contacted me first about a job opportunity, which I found really strange initially. But thinking about it from their perspective, my Twitch channel served as really authentic insight into the person that I am, how I am to work with, and my deaf skills, and giving them that insight, especially in a really, really remote world, makes it easier for them to see that you are the developer they want. So initially, out of the five jobs I interviewed for, in which three reached out to me, I got job offers from all but one, and all the salaries were really competitive. Sport alert, PMC one. And so let's recap. How has live streaming helped me in my tech here as a whole? I'm a pretty comfortable speaker now, used to be really shy. And my ability to explain how application works, works has improved. My ability to write the technical documentation has improved as well, due to my viewers asking for it. I can give you a demo like Nobody's Business. Streaming has elevated me in so many ways. And most importantly, it has given me so much more confidence and has shown me how important it is to put yourself out there while learning something new. Because you never know what kind of new opportunities will come. I hope sharing my experience was inspiring. I hope you give streaming a try and have fun with it. And I encourage you to think about how live streaming can benefit you as an individual and as a company and do your research. If one of your goals is to increase engagement and build community around you, your service or product, you probably should be live streaming. As I previously mentioned, I started streaming to connect with others with similar interest. My live streams are all about coding while listening to metal. And I call myself metal and coffee. And here's a peek into my world. A metal and coffee. Good morning. Wake up. I did it. That was a secret sauce. I like my metal face. It's pretty metal. It's pretty great. I'm not using low dash. Yes, metal it up sluggers. I guess not. No return is not. How do I how do I You're suddenly not a number. I'm not good enough for you. Developers developers developers. And he's like, I can't scream. Thank you. If you have any questions about live streaming, please feel free to come by and ask me and I'm happy to help you get started. Also, we were hiring at PMC and clearly they encourage you to be quirky self like myself. So if you have any questions, let me know. Thank you so much. We actually have a question from the live stream. Yep. So Ebony, one question from the chat and I'm here in the back of the room. CMX Connect says, can you please mention useful channels related to software development that you know of from Twitch? Yeah, so GitHub is a really great example of a company has a Twitch channel. They do a lot of interviews, which I really find useful in terms of individuals. One of my inspirations for really getting deep into the programming community on Twitch is White Panther. She is from England and she works for Netlify and she does really amazing and fun streams. He's also a rock star as well. Have you ever considered or will you ever do a live stream where you teach other people how to live stream? If it's an interest, I'm totally down for that. It can be very overwhelming using all the tools, but I'm really excited to get more people, especially developers and anyone in tech and anyone in design and doing all the things on Twitch. How do you handle sensitive information on your live stream like passwords? So there's a couple of ways. I'm just very conscious of it. You know API keys, address and all that. So I use VS Code and one of the extensions for VS Code is Cloak. Like for instance, if you're working with a .env file that has all of the secrets in that you can just cloak your file and it'll hide everything. Otherwise, it's just being really aware of what you're going to screen at all times. It can be kind of annoying sometimes, but better safe than sorry. Yes. So I've had a slip. I've had API keys slip a couple of times and then I just immediately reset the key. So it happens. Do you ever code like do work stuff on your live stream or is it just like personal projects inside projects? Well, my work is proprietary for sure. But I have been starting to do co-working streams where I don't really show my screen. I'm just working, doing my day-to-day job and people are kind of just hanging out with me listening to metal. Okay, just one more. Yeah, that's fine. So I just want to ask, I've done lots of YouTube live streaming, but what's the main difference between YouTube live streaming and Twitch? There's not really any major differences. I think because Twitch was like kind of the initial platform for live streaming is more popular. It's been around a very long time. But there really isn't any difference. You can live stream on any platform, but there is a big programming and tech community on Twitch, not so much on YouTube. Okay. Yeah. Thank you.