Writing code doesn't mix well with oration

I'm not sure I always agree with this. David Beazley's 2015 PyCon talk on concurrency (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4) was one of my favorite talks of the conference, and it was almost all just live coding. Part of what made that talk compelling was that it took a concept that lots of people find complex/intimidating (how the internals of an asynchronous IO library work) and in ~30 minutes created a full working example in front of a live audience. Writing the code live…

There are a lot of caveats, good live coding demos seem share some of the same properties: - the presentation is focused on the experience around writing the code. Debugging, tooling, etc. No, I don't want to see you fumble around coding. Yes, I do want to see you interact with your tools and libraries and help me learn something in the process. - the presentation is polished and the presenter knows every single line by heart (and have complete…

I'm not sure I agree, live coding, when polished and done right grounds a presentation. Without a live coding element "technical" presentations can quickly devolve into marketing where grandiose claims are often made that are devoid any merit. I think the real gap is most people underestimate how much preparation time must be invested in a live coding demo.