I’ve been streaming myself doing basic OS hacking for 12 weeks now. Here’s a reflection & some things I’ve learned:

• I’ve gotten compliments on my audio quality – good to know that my mic setup is good.
• I got negative feedback that my screen size was too small – I took action and now stream at 720p which seems comically large to me, but produces a more readable video.
• I got a positive comment on how relaxed I was.
• I got miscellaneous positivity and encouragement from people, wishing me well for my OS, even though I think it’s unlikely they really watched the whole thing or grasp how wildly far I am away from anything significant.
• Performance varies from ~70 views on a video to 1.6k. Live streams tend to do better than pre-recorded videos. I believe also posting about it on Twitter helps.
• I got one chat comment from a person really excited about gardening specifically, and followed specifically because I used this phrasing.
• I have a couple people that are interested and follow fairly closely – shoutout to l1zard and arash11!
• I have 10 people in my Discord despite not publicizing it. l1zard and Glenford Williams are the most active.
• It seems to not really matter that I’m not doing any serious OS dev, or that I was doing boring stuff like working on the build system. Some people were still interested even though I was doing possibly the most boring tasks possible.
• I slightly regret spending so long doing random Makefile and build system refactors which in retrospect were a bit of a waste of time. But in the end, taking any action at all was the most important thing, and now I have something in motion and can course correct. I already course corrected by quitting the build system and moving to working on C refactors. I might course correct again and entirely switch to JOS which has much better foundational build infrastructure etc, and is also much more minimal – leaving much more work for me to actually do, including accessible beginner projects. It might be worth simply trying the JOS assignments rather than randomly hacking around at will.

I’ve had a lot more growth than I would have thought: going from 300 to 700 subscribers, and > 1k views on some videos. There are a lot of reasons to think this wouldn’t have achieved those results:

• It’s long, unedited, and the value in it is very sparse
• I was just working on the build system, not really doing anything interesting
• My font size was way too small for most streams
• I stream on Sundays when people are plausibly out doing things (but on the other hand, maybe they’re relaxing inside)