Alternatively, if you don't care about having an audience, you can just do private livestreams directly to YouTube via OBS. After your stream is concluded, it saves the livestream as a VOD. With this method, you don't have to worry about storing large video files when recording yourself.

Also, because it's YouTube, you inherit all of the benefits YouTube provides. You get the added benefit of having closed captioning for your videos after processing. You can watch through your recordings at 2x speed. And of course, you can share VODs to other people if you ever need to.

I've been treating YouTube as a personalized streaming website with free, unlimited storage.

If you do end up doing this, make sure to avoid any copyrighted content (Netflix, official music, etc.), otherwise YouTube will copyright strike your channel.

I also considered this in the past but sometimes, I slip into procrastination mode unintentionally and might check my bank account (or pornhub) once in a while. So thinking my video is uploaded to somebody else's computer gives me the shivers.

Have a user account just for streaming. Then you can block any sites that you don't want shown.

It seems the point of doing this is it stops you procrastinating, because you're pretending to be a hot shot twitch streamer. If it were a live stream, you wouldn't start watching porn, you'd stay focused.

Basically the productivity tip is to pretend you're already productive.

Fair point. But sometimes the pretending part fades away when I get to the "flow". When that happens, I usually forget OBS was even running way after the task was done. If it were Twitch stream, I imagine somebody from the chat window would remind me to put my d* away

Thank you for posting this. A couple of months ago I built out the design then all the FE code for a prototype app, and recorded the whole process as J was doing it, mainly as an experiment to see where o could improve a few aspects of my designing/developing.

It was all a huge faff as I was just recording short screen captures using QuickTime. But it's definitely the most productive I've been for a very long time, as well as ending up with designs better than anything else I've done for the last year. I did it at work in the office over a few days, so couldn't really talk my way through it (which I think would have improved things still further). I haven't repeated the technique because of the (non programming) effort involved, but Obs seems very good, and something that should push me to try to implement the technique a lot more.

One thing that helped me was screen recording my editor session and then re-watching it on the highest playback speed. You start to get a feel for the arc of laying out the code, what refactoring operations look like. Most code is selection, map, map, filter, reduce, re-join, etc. Watching your actions get played back, allows you to re-think those thoughts but in the third person. Mirrors help, video helps, we are not ourselves, once you realize that, optimization becomes much easier.

> Mirrors help, video helps, we are not ourselves, once you realize that, optimization becomes much easier.

It's funny, in two of the areas I've worked in (tailoring and illustration) I was taught techniques that are analogues to this. With illustration, if you draw from a reference, one of the ways to improve accuracy is to turn the reference image upside down, which basically stops your brain seeing it as the thing it is an image of. Instead it becomes a structure of shapes, it's easier to draw. With tailoring, when cutting on a model/dummy, I was taught to continually check the work in a mirror instead of always looking directly at it -- again, I think a way to stop the brain automatically filling in structures and shapes, to force it to see the piece as a whole from a different perspective.

How did you come across these techniques? Do you know of any body of research that covers this?

With my kid, we practice drawing and eating with the non-dominant hand or try and draw something from a different orientation.

I was trained (and worked, for a short time) in tailoring/fashion, and was also trained and worked (for a longer time) as a designer and illustrator. I was just taught to do this as a matter of course (by tutors and by technicians). It's just finding ways to trick your brain into actually thinking about things instead of relying on (habitually ingrained) automatic movements which tend to cause you to miss obvious errors.

Re illustration, this is quite common when explaining how to draw from a reference picture. Not at any detailed length as far as I can ever remember, literally just "turn the photograph upside down when you're drawing from it" (doesn't really need much explanation, that just how it works). As far as introductory books go I can remember "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" goes through this.

Re tailoring, the issue is that you tend to fuck up the balance of things in 3D when you're sitting staring at specific bits of it, even when you step back you only tend to see what you want if you've been at it for a while. You need to be able to see it from a. different angles at the same time, and b. not just directly through your eyes

The non-dominant hand will work for what you're doing, it's a good thing to do I think (in a way I wish I'd been taught to practise using my right more when I was a child). The reference image technique is specifically to increase accuracy though, so slightly different aim

> Most code is selection, map, map, filter, reduce, re-join, etc

In which language do you code?

I take it they're speaking generally, as that covers all languages: map something to data, take that data and do something to it, map it back out to something a human or computer wants.

I imagine by speaking out loud you also get a type of "rubber duck debugging" that makes it easier to work through problems too. Nice idea!

I loved this idea. Can you share your Obs defaults/workflow for this? By example, I work 8hs per day, how much space all this audio/video recording will take? What video/resolution/etc? Thank you!

Honestly for me it was just the act of being able to see my picture and my screen moving inside OBS, not even the fact that it was recording. I tried streaming myself live coding on Twitch a couple times and it was a blast. I felt like I was thinking so much more clearly. I didn't save the recordings—just the act of it all was worthwhile.

the idea is to make a video that you can watch yourself. 8 hours of video isn't very enticing to watch. i suggest organizing the recordings by feature or task.

the only other thing I considered setting up in OBS is to make it work with Spotify to get a great bg music.

That's a great idea. I have done this with vlogs/podcasting and even blogging (created several fake blogs over the years, even in a journal on paper), but never while coding or otherwise doing stuff on the screen. Good stuff.

I don't have anything to add but I feel like a simple upvote does not do this idea justice - that's so awesome, I have to try it!

Such a good idea.

ha, I do this too, thought I was the only one