DEV Community: Andy Morrell (LuckyNoS7evin)

The Live Coders - Intake 11th July 2020

Andy Morrell (LuckyNoS7evin) — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 21:05:58 +0000

July started as a big month for applications, the team is taking a more prominent role in the application process and making that more transparent to those on the outside looking in.

So to start we have the new Applications page on The Live Coders website -> JOIN US

The second part of that is the new Nurture Program. When an applicant doesn't quite hit the minimum criteria to join the team we now accept those into the Nurture Program. This give broadcasters access to a limited subset of the Live Coders discord server but with access to all 190+ members of the team.

With that here are the new Teammates and new Nurture Program broadcasters for The Live Coders

New Team Members

Nurture Program

Blue light optics (glasses) - Myth?

Andy Morrell (LuckyNoS7evin) — Sat, 30 May 2020 12:52:27 +0000

Firstly, I would like to start by saying hello and welcome to anyone who reads this. I have written below what I believe regarding blue light. I'm here to give my experience, hope others learn from that or I create a debate/discussion on the matter.

Blue Light, what?

So what exactly is blue light? Well, until 2018, I wasn't even really aware of it so here's the Wikipedia definition taken from here [taken on 25th May 2020].

“In ophthalmology, high-energy visible light (HEV light) is high-frequency, high-energy light in the violet/blue band from 400 to 450 nm in the visible spectrum. Despite a lack of concurring scientific evidence, HEV light has sometimes been claimed to be a cause of age-related macular degeneration. Some sunglasses and beauty creams specifically block HEV, for added marketing value.”

My Story

In late 2018 I started a new role for a company. This role was almost 100% remote. After the initial visit to HQ, I would only visit again 6-7 times during the 15 months I was there. Since those 15 months came to an end, I have now started my own company.

So back to the reason I mention the 100% remote working. I was working, streaming, developing and gaming from the same setup, all week, every week. I was finishing work, doing some family stuff and then going back to that same environment. In mid 2019 I was starting to suffer, I was doing too much. I cut down streaming. I cut down extra work and I cut back on PC time. I felt a lot better.

I had felt like this before in 2017 where my prescription had changed a lot in only 2 years. The previous incidents in 2017 included vomiting and hospital visits. There is very much an importance on eye health and eye strain, since then I even get my prescription done yearly

The final issue I had was headaches. It wasn't my prescription as I have my eyes tested regularly, I also knew it wasn't down to much else, apart from screen time. When your job is software development, it's pretty hard not to look at a screen most of the time.

What happened next?

It came to TwitchCon 2019. I was off to San Diego for a few days, not only to network, I was also there to see a little bit of contract work I did for Twitch go live (it worked BTW). The conference was going on and as I was walking around the shop floor so to speak, I found GUNNAR Optiks. I had a great talk with them about their glasses, about blue light, which led to me standing there for an hour just discussing life in general. I made one point, "It's a shame you don't do prescription!". I had heard of GUNNAR before, not really looked into it though, and as soon as I said it, I got an instant reply of "Yeah, we do!". “Wow, fantastic, I'll take a pair!!”

Fast forward 3 months

I went home, waited for Black Friday and “boom!”, Got myself a prescription pair of GUNNAR glasses. I went with the 65 BLPF, as I thought the clear 35 BLPF was going to be too light, and the 90 and 98 were going to be too strong. The middle ground is seemingly the best place to be at times.

7 months on

It's now May 2020, I get asked when I stream, in meetings and on other occasions about my glasses.

“Do they work?”
“How do you find the tint?”
“Why not put a filter on your screen?”

Hopefully I can give my experience on some of these questions.

Do they work?

Well, I haven't had a headache since November 2019, I think that's pretty good. Now, when I say I haven't had a headache, that's a little bit of a lie, I had a few too many Gin & Tonics a couple of months ago. That gave me a headache, rather than looking at the screen all day.

Do you notice the tint when you’re wearing them?

In all honesty no, there are even times I don't take them off when I finish work, as I just forget I have them on. Yes you can tell things aren't quite white, however your mind seems to adjust to this after about 30 minutes, and you completely forget white is not white anymore.

Why not put a filter on your screen?

With five monitors, two TVs, mobile phones and tablets, in all honesty, it's easier wearing the glasses.

Why not use build in blue light filters on monitors/screens?

Okay, that may help a little (I don't know, I've never tested it). However, surely you are just dimming the light that is still being directed at you rather than actually filtering that light? Until someone can show me this actually does work, I will remain a sceptic on the matter of built in filters.

In the end

In the end, this is my opinion, yes it works.

Let's have a healthy discussion on why you think they don't or if you agree with me, why? Have you got any, and where did you get them from?

The tech behind, The Live Coders Conference April 2020

Andy Morrell (LuckyNoS7evin) — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 10:48:59 +0000

What can I say about the first Live Coders Conference? I think I have to mention a little back story as well, how I got involved. The end result was a 17hour live stream on Twitch.tv with over 1 million channel views, a peak of more than 15,000 viewers, an average of over 3,000 viewers over that 17 hours and 3.2 million minutes watched (yes 6 years watch time).

At the start of March 2020 a Live Coder team member by the name of Ted Young a.k.a JitterTed wrote a simple line in the Live Coders Discord server. "Should we do a Live Coders Conference?". Things escalated quickly, within the first week we had a spreadsheet full talks, around 38 from 14 speakers.
I volunteered to take a look at the tech, we wanted to broadcast from a single Twitch channel with no breaks, i.e. not turning the stream off between speakers and treating it as a single program or two depending on the number of speakers we had.

Two weeks on the 16th of March came along. It was time to pick our speakers and organize what we were going to give. At this point, I had somehow become a lead organizer of the conference (luckily not for too long). I have no idea how or why but I rolled with it, as it would be a fantastic experience.

We chose our speakers, decided on a single day conference of 14 speakers, on the 9th April split between 2 individual 7hour streams. So we are sorted, right? No, we had theming, advertising, speakers & MCs to set up the tech with, find a way of producing the event, moderation and much more in not a large amount of time with everyone on the team having day jobs and/or little time to commit to the organization of the event.

The Tech

I'm here today not to talk about the organization and lessons learned from the whole event. I'm here to take you through the full tech setup we used and some of the failings myself and the rest of the team would like to look into for future conferences.

Azure

We used Microsoft Azure to host all external services that the speakers or MCs did not need to control.

RTMP & Broadcast Software

With the aim of having speakers and MCs all routed through to a single Twitch channel without disconnecting between each speaker or presenter, we chose to have an RTMP server act as a middleman between the broadcasters and the production broadcast software.

RTMP? What?

Real-Time Messaging Protocol was originally used by Macromedia for audio streaming, however now this includes a lot more. It is almost "the standard way" of broadcasting video. It is also available in most standard broadcast software like OBS, Wirecast, VMix etc.

How to set up an RTMP server

Create the VM

Select Ubuntu VM
Basics: something like as follows, it is up to you if you use private key or password for SSH as long as you're able to SSH into the VM after install
Disks: No changes needed
Networking: As this is the first of 2 VMs in this group you are fine with creating a new network, keep a note of the network name so we can use it later when adding the 2nd VM
Management, Advanced and Tags: No changes needed
Review and create the VM

Install RTMP

SSH into your new Ubuntu VM
Run the following:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install nginx
sudo apt install libnginx-mod-rtmp
Yes, two separate install steps, I like to know one is installed before the other.
sudo nano /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
add in the following snippet to the end of the nginx.conf we just opened.

rtmp {
        server {
                listen 1935;
                chunk_size 8192;

                application live {
                        live on;
                        record off;
        }
    }
}

sudo systemctl restart nginx
We are done with this server...

The Streaming VM

Software

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) - The streaming/broadcast software used.
OBS Websockets - a Websocket addon for controlling and listening to OBS remotely
VLC - This was installed prior to the broadcast but wasn't going to be used, it eventually became invaluable.

Creating the Streaming VM

This is done in the same way as creating the RTMP VM however there are several changes to be made while doing this.

The VM type - We need to go for Windows this time and in this case, we go for Windows 10
The VM size - The important factor here is CPU, initially go for something that is 16 Core at least. On the day of your conference bump that up to be on the safe side. I went up to a 32 core system on the day of the conference
When you get to the network tab make sure you use the same VNet you set up when creating the RTMP VM. Otherwise, data transfer between the two boxes is "gonna cost ya!"

Installing the software

OBS - https://obsproject.com/

Download and install the 64 bit version

VLC - https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.en-GB.html

Again, download and install the 64 bit version

OBS Websockets - https://github.com/Palakis/obs-websocket/releases

That's it software install complete. On install of VLC, you get an added extra in OBS which is VLC Media Source. This can be used to listen to RTMP streams, I was looking into this however as I said before wasn't going to use it. I eventually did during the 17+ hour stream.

Using the broadcast VM as a producer

The broadcast VM and RTMP server were ready to roll, ready to go. So how did I set up OBS and VLC on the server so we could broadcast to the viewers?

OBS

The following scenes where created:

Starting
Ending
Break
MC
LuckyNoS7evin
A scene for each speaker split into 2 groups, in the order they were speaking, and this referenced the 2 scenes mentioned below.
2 scenes which were used as the RTMP stream scenes one for stream key A and one for B

The images here is the scene setup and how the Media Source component was set up for the RTMP streams.

As you can see we set the input to rtmp://{Internal IP}/live/{stream key}. The important thing to NOTE here is: Use the internal IP address of the rtmp server in your VM. So the traffic between RTMP and Broadcast server is not counted as external data transfer out of Azure

My Job as producer

Scene switch between MC and Speaker
Make sure stuff didn't break and if it did try and fix and fix fast
Monitor audio
Featured.chat - show questions when speakers were ready
Get speakers and MCs connected with minimal effort

Speaker & MC setup

As a speaker or MC of The Live Coders Conference, you were given a stream key by myself. This is to uniquely identify you in the RTMP streams I was receiving.

Speakers were split into 2 groups and I used 2 stream keys for all 14 speakers (this was an issue, read Issues section) and with those two groups, speakers and the stream keys were playing leapfrog. e.g. speaker 1 used stream key A, speaker 2 used stream key B and speaker 3 used stream key A again and so on.

MCs were given a single stream key as there was going to be a gap between their sections of the conference.

Each speaker or MC would go into OBS or their broadcast software of choice, select a custom server to stream to and use the Public IP address of our RTMP server. The URL used would have been something like rtmp://{IP}/live. The stream key was used as the stream key.

This example is how OBS is the setup:

When the speaker was about to start their talk they would connect their broadcast to the rtmp stream, which I then picked up.

Each speaker and MC was given a package of theme items to use during the broadcast and set up their own scenes within broadcast software to do this.

Each speaker had their own hardware and software which I was not responsible for, however, I will talk about this in issues.

Issues

So down to the issues I faced:

RTMP - I should have used individual stream keys per user, rtmp was at times being a pain with connections and re-connections to the rtmp streams
Audio desync - There were times the audio and video desync'd, we believe this is down to RTMP and buffers. More research is needed on this.
Audio issues - There were a few moments where audio just "broke" now this I believe was down to the RTMP connects and reconnects I mentioned in point 1 of this list but that is unconfirmed.
Audio Monitoring was hard
Too many manual processes

What did I learn?

A 20hour shift is not something I want to try again.

I woke up on the morning of the conference at 6am BST, a full 7 hours before I was running a stream that would last 17+ hours. This was the doing of my 3 and a half-year-old and something that I should have planned for. By the time it got to 24 hours later at 6am BST on the 10th of April I was "DONE".

Have more backup, especially for the producer.

Only one person knowing the tech inside out, knowing all the passwords was not a great idea. I had a backup, it was wasn't a great one and very last minute.

RTMP is a bit flaky at times

I need to look at new tech or make sure our RTMP setup is rock solid. I think it was partially RTMP and partially the way I used it which made some things go a little wrong

The Future

I want to do this again, I want to produce a couple more at least. There are plans and more research to be done. Improve on what we did, the stats speak for themselves, it was an amazing event. However, I feel there were definitely points we could improve on and I hope to correct some of the mistakes I made.

If you have any questions please ask, I would love to expand on every section of this article down the line. Take each part and do a full rundown on why.

Setting up an online conference - Part 1

Andy Morrell (LuckyNoS7evin) — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 16:11:43 +0000

2020 is shaping up to be very interesting from the standpoint of conferences and large gatherings of people. At this point, I'm glad to see the hard choices being made. Let's try and contain and stop the spread.

With so many conferences being cancelled we hear "what shall we do instead?", "I was going to {x} conf, what should I do with my time now?" or "I was going to talk at {y}, I can't do that now".

What's the solution?

In some cases, the option is to go online. I'm going to describe the setup that I am using to create an online conference. This conference is free to view. I'm afraid if you want "paid-for content", that would be a more complicated setup and not something I will cover.

Who?

I am a part of a large community of developers and creators on the Twitch streaming platform called The Live Coders. You can find us at: https://livecoders.dev

With 120 broadcasters who specialise in Edutainment (Education while entertaining), we are in a special position to be able to pool our resources and create the first running of The Live Coders Conference.

Why?

There are several reasons for doing this:

Some of The Live Coders have talks they aren't able to give now
We can - we are broadcasters and have the setup to do this
Team promotion - The Live Coders are a diverse community. Many people including Twitch users don't realise a community like this exist.

How!

Individually the team are broadcasters, we each have our own setups and broadcast to our own individual Twitch channels. This is a problem:

How do we allow the speakers in our conference to broadcast to one channel?
How do we broadcast a full day of the conference without downtime between each speaker?
What happens if there are technical issues?
What can we do to avoid "dead air"?

Answers

It quickly became apparent that we wanted to stream to a single channel for the day. This was going to be difficult if we wanted each speaker to broadcast there would have to be downtime between each speaker as they got themselves connected to the channel. The ability to have filler between speakers would not work and in very simple terms it wouldn't look professional.

Part 1

An MC, we needed a Master of Ceremonies. Someone who could broadcast from their system for the day and receive the broadcast from the speakers and "relay" that through their system. So how do they receive the broadcast from the speaker? This was an easy fix and a suggestion from several on the team. An RTMP server (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) would be used this would relay the broadcast from the speaker to the MC.

Perfect I hear you cry! Well not quite, after setup of an RTMP server locally I realised there is an issue with direct connections with people on the other side of the world, this could be an issue for anyone who was going to be an MC.

Part 2

An RTMP relay does not have to be powerful, it can be a very basic VM somewhere, anywhere in the world. Fantastic, I created a VM in Azure... The issue from part 1 was solved, there were no connection issues the second time around and we can put this VM in a region fairly central to the speakers. Not all sunshine and lollypops, there was an issue, having multiple RTMP streams coming into the server is no issue Azure doesn't charge for ingress. The issue was egress, 3 streams going out to the MC, at between 3000 and 5000 Kbps was going to cost us more than needed.

Part 3 - The Final Setup

A second VM was created in azure, on the same network as the RTMP relay server. This is a Windows 10 VM and 16 vCPU. The cost of which is not what we call "cheap" however is $0.666/hour and would be on only during the conference hours (around 12-15) and initial testing (about 2 hours).

This VM would be used as the broadcast machine, receive the RTMP feeds and broadcast to Twitch.

FINAL SETUP

WHAT? Why are there two arrows for the MC?

The MC is also broadcasting to the RTMP server, this means their camera or whatever they are broadcasting is available at the broadcast server. The connection to the Broadcast Server, that is for monitoring and use of the broadcast machine. This is done via remote desktop.

Hang on you didn't cover technical issues

As we are not reliant on the individual speakers connecting and disconnecting from the Live Coders twitch channel and as we have an MC as a relay. We are able to cover any technical issues easily with zero downtime to the broadcast.

The Cost

For the above setup in Azure, the estimated cost all in is looking to be around $20-30 for the conference, including tests.

What next - Part 2

The second part of "Setting up an online conference" will go into the setup of a broadcasters machine and how they will broadcast to the RTMP and the management of a stream for the MC and software used in that.

Is there a barrier to entry for .Net?

Andy Morrell (LuckyNoS7evin) — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 19:19:20 +0000

So, if you want to know who I am, check out this quick video. It's easier to say than fill half a post with introductions.

Where we start

The reason we are here is a perception, that .Net isn't an easy entry into development. Until recently I thought the same, however, what changed my mind, why don't we see these easy entries and how do we change the preconception that .Net is hard, compared to other languages?

My initial thoughts

I like most thought, yes .Net is NOT an easy access framework, whereas some, for example, Javascript and Python, you can get something on the screen in fewer steps and less time. It's 2020, people, including me, have developed a need for instant gratification. The following was my initial thoughts, that at the time I wrote in an email conversation I was having with fellow developers.

Javascript:

Install Node.js
Open notepad
Write basic Hello World
Open CMD/Terminal
node index.js

Python:

Install Python
Open notepad
write basic Hello World
Open CMD/Terminal
python3 hello.py

.Net:

Do I want the Full Framework or Core
What is Core?
Oh hang on isn't .Net Windows only?
Okay Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio as an IDE?
Okay install Visual Studio - massive install with many options including Python and Node
okay now I'm ready to code something
Build
dotnet run

Here .Net has the distinct disadvantage of being a bit of mess, where there are multiple frameworks in multiple versions. People who are looking to start development don't know or understand the differences.

Although an IDE is not necessarily needed, if you don't use Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code, you're putting yourself at another disadvantage. Then the size of something like Visual Studio doesn't help (although it is free)

There are also perceptions that .Net is for windows only, only middle-aged men use it and it's not as popular as it once was.

What changed my mind?

2020 the release of .Net 5, this means a unified framework, none of this "Core vs Full" and well we get a single framework that's multi-platform. This brings less complication on where to start.

A comment from a fellow developer & Microsoft MVP Ben Adams, of how the future will look, when .Net 5 comes around went a little something like:

.NET

Install .Net 5 (https://get.dot.net/)

type: dotnet new console

open Program.cs in notepad (see it already says "Hello World")

type: dotnet run

Now, this seems to be way better, I agree it does and yes no IDE needed. Okay, this all makes sense. So the next question...

WHY?

Why are we not seeing this very basic "Getting started in .Net" or "Getting started with C#". I don't know to be honest with you. Is it because as a 15 year veteran in .Net I've never had to start from scratch in .Net and C#? The answer is most likely yes.

Since .Net and C# have changed so much in the last few years with the advent of .Net Core and the soon to be .Net 5. Is it time we start looking at bringing more developers into the community that is .Net. Well, some already have been doing this for a few years, so let's ramp this up and bring in more.....

So here's my first

Welcome to the first, Getting started with .Net and C# in 5 easy steps!

Download .Net SDK 3.1 from here for your selected OS
Install what you downloaded
Open CMD or Terminal (in a directory of your choosing) and run the following: dotnet new console
Open Program.cs in your favourite text editor, oh look Hello World is done for you.
Back in CMD or Terminal (in the directory you were in before run: dotnet run

Final Thoughts

Is there a barrier to entry with .Net? Yes, there is.

Should there be? No, I don't feel there should.

What can we do to change that? Don't over-complicate the "Getting started", change the way we the .Net veterans teach and talk those new to .Net. Don't jump straight in with "Let's do SignalR". Let's try and encourage the new developers, let's give them instant gratification. Can we go back to a simpler time, were a Hello World tutorial didn't mean spending a large amount of time downloading all the pre-requisites before we even start.

What are your thoughts?