Start With a Bang

Happy New Year!

We left behind 2021, our second year covered with Covid, and moved into 2022. Just when I was about to close the year, traditionally baking a huge batch of “Oliebollen”, “Appelflappen” and “Ananasflappen” (Google it if you don’t know what they are), I received an email from Twitch Corp telling me that I leveled up to Twitch Affiliate.

Twitch Affiliate

If you look at the specs it doesn’t feel like a massive thing:

– Reach fifty followers
– Stream for eight hours
– Stream on seven different days
– Average of three viewers

… but it is harder than you think.

The requirements span is within a 30-day timeframe. The “Stream for eight hours” and ” Stream on seven different days” are the easy ones although reserving seven days out of thirty to do live streaming is already hard to reach for most but it is something you simply can set your mind to and do it without the help of the community. It means streaming twice a week for over an hour to get the eight hours and seven instances in place.

With a niche subject (Live Coding is already a niche subject on its own on Twitch) such as Office Development, coding in general, it is extra hard to get someone’s attention on Twitch. Twitch is more focused on gaming where streamers are sharing their gameplay on stream.

Twitch is not actively pushing content under the noses of people, so you must build your own attention to your channel. Next step is to reach the fifty followers and average of three viewers. Especially the last part, getting an average of three viewers during the full eight hours is tough. People quickly visit and leave after watching for a while, and as it is a chicken-egg issue (more viewers give more interaction making it more interesting to join in and stick around) they usually zap over to other channels after watching a few minutes. If lucky you get them to follow you and show up again at a later session.

In the last week of the year, I was lucky another developer channel on Twitch, going by the name of “one1lion”, to raid my channel when he ended streaming for the day and that gave exposure to my channel from another direction. I really appreciate him doing that for me and make sure you visit his channel; you can learn a thing or two from that.

Anyway, 2022 started with a blast for me, let’s see where we go this year and check in at my now Twitch Affiliate channel and hit the follow button!

Moving Day

foto by @crystalmariesing via Twenty20

I have been preparing this for some time now, but still in progress … I moved my personal blog from www.maartenvanstam.nl to the Soft as in Software blog.softasinsoftware.com. In fact, the old blog still exists but as you are reading this, new posts will only appear on this address: blog.softasinsoftware.com.

The purpose of this blog is that it will match my ‘new’ media where my blog will match my video streams on my Soft as in Software YouTube channel, and my Soft as in Software Twitch channel. Don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel or follow the Twitch channel while you are at it 😉.

I have picked up Live Coding again on YouTube and Twitch where I currently focus on Office Add-in development and Blazor Web Assembly development.

With Office Add-in development the focus is on the OfficeDev PnP repo monitored by Microsoft. This repo needs some serious attention to get it up to a decent quality standard. Some samples are outdated, new samples are needed, so in short much to do there. If you are into that feel free to join me on that.

For Blazor Web Assembly the goal is to rebuild my Soft as in Software landing page. This will be my main source related to the Soft as in Software ‘brand’ if you like. Even this blog will be available from that site. So, if you forgot where to find my blog, simply go the Soft as in Software landing page where you can find the blog in one of the menu items.

With this quick post I re-open my blog and if you are into Office Development (this is a huge area so keep coming back for one or more Office Development updates) or .NET/Blazor minded this blog, my videos on YouTube or Live Stream on YouTube and Twitch might interest you as well.

I have so many plans with this, I am looking forward to a new fresh start and I like to make this interactive, so if you want to share your comments or work with me on the repos, just holler and we’ll see how we can get this going.

In my next blog I will get into some more details on what happened and get into my plans for all of this. Stay tuned!

Happy 2020

It’s been a while, almost year, here … and whenever there is a new year, we pick up our resolutions from last year and see what we can do that we missed progressing the past year. Blogging is one of these things … so let’s pick this up again for now and see where it ends.

In my professional work I’ve been limited in doing things programmer-wise, more a people manager than coding manager at this time. Trying to get our foreign team up and running and at sometimes actually deliver some products. Doing so means I have almost no time at all to do programming.

For this reason, I decided to go on and do the Live Coding thing. Forcing me to go live in front of a camera and coding live on screen is pushing me to keep my coding skills on par. Not easy as what you learn today is outdated tomorrow, but boy … the things you can do in code these days are absolutely amazing!

So join me in my Live Coding sessions on Twitch. You can find my channel here:

https://twitch.tv/MaartenVanStam

Hit the follow button if you are, like me, too lazy to look up the broadcast schedule so you get notified whenever I get online to do the Programming Thing.

At this time I’m working on two main topics:

· Office Development (Who would have guessed?) where I’m trying to do the same things that I was able to do using VSTO to build my Add-ins. Spoiler Alert: You can’t do everything you were able to do with VSTO, but you can do some cool shit anyway …

· Blazor Web Development, building web sites using C# and .NET Core … where Office moved away from .NET to Web Technologies .NET did exactly the other way around and is now focusing on Web Technologies!

Let me know what you think about all these new and not so recent technologies … will they save the world?