Lights, Camera, Action!
A new twist on fixing bugs
With our second release around the corner, summer internship interviews happening left and right and not to mention a Capstone project that’s causing a ton of headaches, I’ve been busy to say the least. But I’ve recently turned “busy” into a new kind of busy! Previously, I had taken to blog posts to express, document and portray my OSS work but now, I’m looking to live-stream on YouTube!
YouTube: A new platform
Live-streaming has been something I wanted to try for sometime after being introduced to The Joy of Coding hosted by Mozillian Mike Conley. I wanted to give it a shot as another way of expressing my thoughts and more importantly, practice “speaking out loud” for technical coding interviews (something which I’m not good at under pressure). I think it’s a win-win situation and it’s turned out great so far — see for yourself:
The overall reception as amazing! I received multiple retweets, comments and likes as well as recognition from Kumar McMillan and @diox, both accomplished AMO engineers:
In addition, I was very happy to see a recent friend, Caitlin Neiman — Community Manager at Mozilla, reach out to say nice work! Caitlin she had vouched for me back in my previous blog post, Revision 0.1: New Projects:
With such a warm welcome and a deep enjoyment of live-streaming, I think I found how I would like to leave behind my mark on the web! With all that being said, let’s quickly dive into how I was able to setup live-streaming from my Macbook and then into my bugs.
Stream Your Thoughts
Mike had referred me to a program called OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) which was super simply to install: brew cask install obs using Homebrew Cask. Within a few minutes, I had OBS up and running:
Instead of writing out an entire guide on how to use OBS, I would love to take this opportunity to reference a great blog post by Drew Tyler! He clearly and concisely outlined the steps needed to setup your own YouTube stream. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter if you have any further questions!
Action!
With OBS setup, I wanted to break down my thought process for my bug, showing how I was going to tackle things:
After exploring what was given to me, I made changes in a variety of source files and ended up with TravisCI breaking. After scratching my head for a bit, I left a comment on my PR asking for feedback to keep me going in the right direction.
With a response from Mathieu in the morning, I set out with some more hints that helped me progress some more:
After waiting on TravisCI to build my latest modifications, I had a beautiful purple “Merged” symbol and another contribution under my belt — woohoo!
Reflection
I really enjoyed live-streaming my work and challenged my fellow peers to do so, but I definitely recognize that not everyone will be comfortable using this method — which is perfectly okay! Overall, I think that having my content on YouTube will expose my work to a larger user base, even if it’s only one speck out of billions of videos. It may also be easier for audiences to consume the audio passively as well as allowing me to link relevant material — like my website :)
If you’re interested in following along with my journey, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel to stay up-to-date with what I’m currently doing! I also plan to throw up some videos on how to document OSS contributions on your resume using SharedLatex, prepare for technical and behavioral interviews and a few more topics that will help individuals in the Computer Science field.
Until next time,
Sean
