Stream Retrospective 2025

1. Wowsers, a year!

January marks the one-year anniversary of me streaming. I didn’t actually record the first date I streamed anywhere, but as far as I can tell based on other data points it was sometime in the first few weeks of January. So I’m going to just go with January as the origin of the stream.

This is actually completely by coincidence, because I don’t believe in new years resolutions. I believe in starting that thing you want to do right now, whatever it is. There’s no time like the present to make meaningful progress toward that thing. It just so happened that I got all the pieces together and assembled the necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities to make a halfway informed attempt at running a stream around that time.

I have spoken about this before multiple times, but I honestly did not think I’d be here, still streaming, a year later. I didn’t think anyone would watch me. I don’t find myself that interesting. I’m also painfully aware of how many articles there are about how people stream for literal years to an audience of zero, because I read them.

Despite all that, I had a lot of time on my hands as a recently unemployed software developer, and I was curious about streaming. I knew that the potential exists to make actual money from streaming, and that the chances of making any were pretty slim. It still called to me, for reasons I still can’t quite explain. Normally I’m pretty happy to be the guy quietly working alone in the back. But I was curious, it felt like a challenge. It also seemed like a good way to do two important things: get more comfortable in coding interviews, and start building an online presence/network for future employment reasons.

The early days were pretty rough. I was terrified, and struggled with feeling like an absolute fool talking to myself. I also quickly discovered that when you stream your attention is badly split between “stream things” and the activity you’re doing. I was constantly pulled out of focus by checking chat, checking the preview, checking the dashboard to make sure things were still working correctly.

But I persevered, and slowly people started to watch. Now, after a year of streaming, here’s my thoughts on what worked, what didn’t, and where to go from here.

2. What worked?

• Consistency

This is the biggest thing. People have commented that they were impressed by my consistency. This is very strange to me as it seems like the most basic element of anything. I show up. But I have also watched a few channels of similar size slowly fall off and stop making content. I really hope they made that choice because there’s something they would genuinely rather do and not out of frustration or a bad experience.

• Making real things and actually writing code.

It’s sorta “common knowledge” that there is no audience for actual technical content. This is not true, there are others in this space who are successful. There is absolutely some level of interest in real coding out there. It does seem smaller than the level of interest in talking head hot takes content, but it’s a large part of what I want to do. I’m confident that I have room to grow in this area still.

• Making tutorial content

This goes into the “worked” category, but it’s to a lesser extent. When I decided to try and make a tutorial course I figured it would help to show SOMETHING in the videos tab of my channel if anyone happened to drop by my page. I believe that it has helped some, and I continue to see those videos show up in the analytics as videos that contributed to my views pretty regularly. I sometimes even get new comments on them with thanks and/or feedback which I’m super happy about.

• Game streaming

I’ve dabbled in streaming some Shenzhen I/O on my weekends as a way to relax and hang out with my viewers in Europe who are otherwise unable to catch my streams. That’s actually been going pretty well. Interactions during those streams seem higher. I theorize that this is at least partially related to the fact that you don’t need to know as much about what I’m doing to really follow along. The entire context of each puzzle is within the puzzle itself. It’s also a lot of fun to just take a break and play for a while.

3. What needs work?

• Schedule

This is the primary challenge right now. It’s also the most difficult one to solve. I only have so many hours in the day, and my day job consumes a lot of them. The growth of my channels slowed dramatically when I had to change to a later time and reduce the hours I streamed. It’s unclear which of the two has the larger impact overall, but they’re both a problem. If streaming paid the bills this would be easy. I’d like to get there someday. I’m not sure what to do about this in the meantime, but I am aware of it as a problem.

• Shorts?

I have experimented with two shorts. The first one was more serious and attempted to be more encouraging. The second was more sassy. The first has 115 views and 4 likes at a 100% ratio of likes/dislikes. The second has 1,703 with 7 likes and a 70% likes/dislikes ratio. The comparison isn’t precisely apples to apples because for the second I used hashtags and added subtitles. But even that first one has more views than most of my recent streams (and some of the tutorial videos).

• Social Media

I’m bad at this, I’ve been trying to get a little better though. I’m seeing slow growth on the various platforms, and posting there does increase traffic a little bit. But overall I think I need to do better at promoting them to try and form a virtuous cycle where more followers/engagement increases reach which helps me find more people that are interested in my content.

3. What’s the plan going forward?

• Streaming!

I touched on this in my studio update last month but this is a streaming focused post, so here’s more thoughts on the matter.

I’ve been using Restream since I first started streaming to both YouTube and Twitch. Two channels is the limit for their free tier, and I need to decide if I want to upgrade to a paid plan or try to find another tool. They’ve been adding AI crap and keep emailing me about it, which I’m super not enthused with. The overall experience of using them has been OK-ish but not amazing. I’m also not sure where else I really want to stream to. Aside from Twitch and YouTube the only places that I’m aware of that have streams are Kick and X. Is there even an audience there? No idea.

With regard to the coding puzzle game streams, I still plan on doing them. Anything that is close enough to the normal content will probably stay on the normal YouTube channel for now. If I were to branch out into other gaming related content I would break those VOD’s out into the gaming channel I set up but have not yet used. The time investment is the primary reason I have not yet done anything with this. But as a life-long gamer I’d love to do some more gaming on stream.

Scheduling is a little tricky. There are things that I have to do on my days off because I run home, eat, and then jump on stream right after work on all 4 days that I normally stream. Up until streaming pays at least some of my bills I have to try and balance my time as best I can.

• Shorts?

I really don’t like short form content, but everyone keeps saying that it’s important for growth/visibilty. It’s also a large time investment to go and extract shorts from a stream. I’m not going to use any of the endless AI slop tools that keep being shoved into things to extract them either. So I’ll have to try and figure out something I can live with in that arena for balancing the time requirements and my loathing of shorts with the potential benefits.

• Tutorials?

This is a hard call. They take a TON of time to make, and that would cut into time I’d otherwise spend on other content. If you want to see another tutorial series on something though please do let me know somehow. I’m not at all opposed to making them if enough people would find value in them.

4. Goals

I’d like to be monetized on YouTube this year. Not because I think it’s going to make me rich, but because it’s a good growth target.

The first level of monetization currently enables channel memberships and requires 500 subscribers, 3 video uploads in the last 90 days (livestreams do count) and 3,000 public watch hours.

I’m currently just over halfway there on subscribers and almost exactly halfway there on watch hours. I think this is a decent goal.

If I get very, very, lucky I might be able to hit the second level at 1,000 followers and 4,000 watch hours. I would be thrilled to hit that number but doubt it’s realistic.

Twitch wise I’d like to have more active chats this year. Lurkers are always super welcome, but I think having folks in chat talking to one another and me makes the stream better for everyone. I also think this goal is gonna be harder because of the scheduling and the viewer habits of the Twitch community.

5. Closing thoughts

It’s been a wild ride. I thought I’d stream for a few months, get a job, get bored streaming to nobody, and quit. Instead, here I am writing a reflection on a year of streaming. Roughly a thousand people per month view my content, and I even made somewhere around $50 from Twitch this year. Because I expected zero of both I’m calling this year a huge success. Even if the hourly pay is pretty terrible.

With regard to getting better at coding interviews and becoming more well known for employment reasons, it’s a more mixed bag. I have had a few people reach out to me based on my profile, but it hasn’t landed me a new dev job. I am much more comfortable coding in front of people now, but I also find myself less interested in doing yet another coding interview when there are hundreds of hours of me coding for real, live, on the internet.

So far people seem more interested in the process of making applicants sing and dance than in actually determining if we can make things. I think about that every time I use a piece of commercial software that is awful or doesn’t actually work at all.

I’m also seriously questioning whether I can work for yet another set of non-technical PM’s, scrum masters, meeting schedulers, and middle managers. Autonomy is a hell of a drug.

Lastly, I want to mention that I really appreciate everyone that reads this blog, swings through to chat on stream, comments on a video, or even just watches a video here and there. You’re the reason that I’m still doing this.

I also want to extend an extra huge thanks to everyone that supports me with a subscription or by watching ads. It means more than it probably should, and more than you probably know.

I’m looking forward to another year of growth, writing more code, trying new stuff, and new endeavors!