Today, we're throwing back to when Richard spoke with Salma Alam-Naylor about all things content!

Now had we invited Salma onto Fireside just so Richard could learn how to begin his Twitch streaming career? Potentially.

Salma is a live streamer, software engineer and developer educator. She streams on Twitch under the moniker “whitep4nth3r” -she dives into the backstory around the name in the episode (we think it’s great, for the record).

Salma gets into the weeds about live streaming, content creation and personality. Over the years, she has carefully built her viewership into a vibrant, supportive community that uplifts her.

As we learn, her journey began during the first covid lockdown, although unlike whipped coffee and homemade sourdough, her lockdown passtime actually outlasted the pandemic. As someone with backgrounds in coding, performance and teaching, live streaming herself coding seemed like the perfect intersection of her talents, and we couldn’t agree more. Although coding is what she does the most, cross-stitching and live music have also made appearances on her stream, and yes, her coder heavy audience still shows up for these lives too. This point can be understood when Salma goes into what makes people engage with content online, and what’s been obvious to her is that if people connect with someone online, it doesn’t matter what the content is. The audience will follow.

Salma tells us about the positives and negatives of Twitch, about the harassment she’s received, but also the incredible support from her community. There also turns out to be more similarities between streaming and working on a developer team than just the code. In both cases, a group of people come together with a common goal; whether that be to learn, to connect or to have fun. 

From a metrics perspective, viewer and subscriber counts can be a tough taskmaster, and it can be a challenge not to judge yourself through this very stark measure of “success”. Salma’s solution comes from Maya Angelou - people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. That metric is hard to quantify, but it’s probably also the best one out there.

Find out more and listen to previous podcasts here: https://www.voxgig.com/podcast

Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly updates and information about upcoming meetups: 

https://voxgig.substack.com/

Join the Dublin DevRel Meetup group here: www.devrelmeetup.com