Why You Should Start Codecasting
This daily activity will sharpen your skills as you grow an audience.
Codecasting.
It’s a combination of coding and screencasting, and developers from all corners of world are broadcasting their technical endeavors to anyone who wants to watch. Some use screencasting software and upload their videos to YouTube while others use websites like Livecoding.tv to stream their development sessions live!
I started my own YouTube channel over the weekend to help the members at Free Code Camp Busan with their online JavaScript challenges. We had been experimenting with presentations at our biweekly meetups, but quickly discovered that it’s difficult for a group of people (mostly beginners) to follow along at the same rate.
Watching videos before the meetups offers so many advantages than traditional teaching methods. It’s possible to pause, rewind, skip ahead, and replay videos as often as needed, which isn’t possible during a live presentation.
Nobody wants to be “that annoying student” who slows the rest of the group down with question after question, but the fast pace of many instructor-centered classes more often than not create big gaps of understanding between students.
Give an hour-long demonstration of Git and GitHub to mostly new developers, and then ask “So do you guys have any questions?” to see what I mean. This style of teaching sucks in general, but it’s particularly ineffective for teaching coding.
When explicit instruction and lectures are viewed at home through videos, there is more time for collaborative activities and pair programming to do at the meetups. This “flipped” classroom model places more responsibility on my campers in Busan (they have to actually watch the videos at home), but we have more time to do cool stuff together!
Prevent Rust
To be honest, I am a very selfish person.
I am making these JavaScript videos not only to help others but mainly to help myself! I have been learning Ruby with the Viking Code School for the last couple of months, and even though JavaScript was my first programming language, I am starting to get a bit rusty!
Since I started Ruby, I constantly forget to include semicolons and other important punctuation in my JavaScript files. My text editor catches these mistakes, so it’s not a big deal, but damn it’s annoying to have lost that muscle memory.
By committing to making one video every day, I keep my JavaScript skills sharp while also practicing another very important skill: communicating clearly.
If you are applying to coding bootcamps or actual jobs, you will no doubt have to demonstrate your technical ability with some form of live coding exercises. Programming under observation is difficult enough, but you often have to “think out loud” and explain your thought process as you code. This is actually more difficult than it sounds, and I remember mumbling like a moron the first few times I interviewed for coding bootcamps.
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Your Opinion
Do you think our schools should flip the classroom?
Are you codecasting as well?
Can you think of other benefits to codecasting?
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