Content considerations
Considering sharing your work more publicly through streaming is a great way to get real-time interactions with your work and build a strong community. Below are some reasons why you may consider it, and some options to consider for content when streaming:
- How does your work, or your ideas, fit into streaming as a delivery vehicle
- Sharing your work in real time with an interested audience invites and gives them an idea of what you do. You get to share about your work with a wide variety of folks, possibly grow interest, and have folks from adjacent career paths get insight into your work and network with each other.
- For remote workers, it creates a scheduled time for you to work, and can give the semblance of a real work environment, where there are other people in the room with you, and you’re interacting with them.
- You can “rubber duck” through your work, possibly share topics you’re working on, and invite suggestions or solutions.
- There’s the possibility of growing a strong and active community that can help each other out and build each other’s careers.
- Do you want to be on camera? Are alternatives to that interesting? i.e., an animated avatar of yourself
If you’re not comfortable streaming or displaying a live version of yourself streaming, there are options to use an animation to do your presentations.
Before you go live: security and privacy checklist
Before streaming, check that you are not accidentally sharing:
- private keys, tokens, passwords or API credentials
- unpublished research data
- sensitive personal data
- private Slack, Teams, email or calendar notifications
- internal repository names or issue trackers
- browser tabs with confidential content
- file paths that reveal personal or institutional information
Practical mitigations:
- use a separate browser profile for streaming
- turn off desktop notifications
- use a demo repository or synthetic dataset
- prepare a clean working directory
- hide terminal history if needed
- use OBS scenes so you only share the window you intend to show
Stream ideas:
- Developer stories - interviewing more experienced RSEs about their career journey, how they built confidence, what they work on, etc
- Maybe could be audio only - podcast
- Live pair programming - help normalise and just showcase how it works
- Live drop in session for help with RSE stuff?
- Career showcase stuff - day in the life of a RSE
- Software setups - IDE showcase
- Documentation on getting started with Twitch
- If you do anything physical (e.g. electronics) - demos, live tinkering