All good things must come to an end

A lot has happened since Wednesday 24th June 2020: the day I went live on Twitch for the first time. That was the day I thrust myself upon The Internet and seemingly changed the trajectory of my career, which has taken me to places and introduced me to people I could never even have imagined.

I remember my first stream like it was yesterday. After I pressed the go live button, I remember going back and forth between my makeshift pandemic office upstairs and the lounge downstairs to make sure I was, indeed, broadcasting to the world. (I hadn't yet discovered the Twitch dashboard that lets you monitor your stream in real time.) That first stream had just an average of three viewers, and mainly consisted of counselling a Lithuanian 17-year old who was having trouble with his parents whilst I was building my first open source app: fretonator.com. I often wonder if he's doing OK now.

Despite the strange start to this streaming journey, I was hooked instantly. During the height of the early Covid pandemic panic, before the vaccine was invented, whilst millions of people were dying, as we were all adjusting to remote working in our homes, and whilst my child was just two and a half years old, somehow I found the time and inclination to go live on Twitch four evenings a week consistently. Honestly, I don't know how I did it. But at the time, everyone was on Twitch; it was addictive. Being on The Internet felt like a necessity in the early days of the pandemic, and being part of a live stream hosted by a real person on Twitch was uplifting in an otherwise dire set of circumstances. It was how we stayed connected when we figured we all could just die at any time. And, through streaming and watching others on Twitch I had discovered an incredible community with shared interests who all just simply enjoyed hanging out with each other. It was a truly, truly wonderful time in my life in an otherwise dark, dark time for the planet.

Before Twitch, I was living in a tiny world, working at a local tech agency in Manchester, UK. I had not yet heard of niche sub-categories of the technology industry such as Developer Relations, Developer Advocacy, Developer Experience, or Developer Education. At the time, given that people in these job roles were no longer travelling to events, they had moved their activities to Twitch. By immersing myself in what was then the Science and Technology category on Twitch, and the wonderful mechanics of Twitch raids (where you send all your viewers to another stream when you're ready to go offline), I came to know many people who were working in DevRel, and was entirely enamoured with the whole thing.

I got my first Developer Advocacy job after I got to know a streamer I raided who was a Developer Advocate at the time, LaylaCodesIt. I remember choosing to raid her because she was the only other British woman I witnessed streaming in the Science and Technology category since I discovered Twitch. We became fast friends, we streamed together in a little series we called CodeCake, and she referred me to an ex-colleague of hers who was hiring a front-end specialist Developer Advocate at Contentful. I remember thinking that this type of job was too good to be true. How could it be possible that I could use my expertise in teaching and skills in technology in the same job? (For those of you that don't know my history, I was a music teacher before I started working in tech.) And so in January 2021, the next chapter of my journey began.

Streaming was a big part of my DevRel job at Contentful; I would go live three times a week during work hours consistently. In fact, I got invited to the Twitch Partner program during my time at Contentful, which I attribute to being able to have so much freedom to stream and talk about Contentful in public as part of my job responsibilities, thus being fortunate to build a thriving community. Being a talented and prolific streamer was seen as a valuable asset to any DevRel team at a time when we couldn't really travel safely, and I was proud of the viewership I achieved and sustained.

My next move was to the Netlify Developer Experience team in January 2022. One of the specific reasons they hired me was for the success of my Twitch streams. Netlify was, and still is, a fully remote company. However, as more and more companies started to force people to return to the office in 2023, viewership across the entirety of Twitch started to decline: no longer were people able to tune in to a Software and Game Dev Twitch stream in the background whilst they powered through their JIRA tickets. This, coupled with with the post-pandemic economic decline of the technology industry in general, caused the business value of DevRel teams to be questioned constantly. DevRel teams were now at the top of the elimination list, and this resulted in an alarming shift in how companies valued live streaming in DevRel.

We pay your salary to work for this company. We don't pay you to have fun on Twitch.

I remember very vividly when words to that effect were said to me in a team meeting. It was crushing. The endeavour that had catapulted me into this career, the thing I loved to do so much, the brand of fun and entertainment I had poured my whole heart and soul into, the activity that had got me these first two jobs in the Developer Relations industry: was being condemned as valueless, trivial, worthless. Shortly after that conversation, I was made redundant in a company restructure.

My next move was to Sentry as a Senior Developer Relations Advocate. My manager was very supportive of my Twitch streaming activities and encouraged it, but I couldn't help shake the feeling that I was providing zero business value in return for my efforts. And it is a huge effort: being on camera for four hours at a time, writing code, problem-solving, building something real whilst maintaining an entertaining persona and conversing with viewers really takes it out of you. Plus, viewership across Twitch was declining further, given more and more people were returning to office, save for a few outliers. It also became quite obvious that I was in a sub-optimal time zone for sustained viewership. Twitch remains a very US-centric platform, especially in the Software and Game Dev category. There just weren't that many people browsing Twitch when I went live. Often, I would be at the top of the category when I was live, yet still with only around 100-130 concurrent viewers.

Now, I have written about how your live coding stream does not need a bigger audience, and I stand by that. But, as someone who has a job where the value of your activities are constantly being questioned, that big audience is a real indicator of potential value. If you're showcasing great software to 500 people, the probability that you generate a good amount of interest which results in sign ups and eventual paying customers is much higher than if you're streaming to ~60 viewers. I'd been laid off once before in this industry. And so, naturally, I started to prioritise other activities at work that would be seen as being more valuable in order to keep my job, such as delivering more formal workshops and engaging in other more prominent marketing activities.

And then in the autumn of 2024, my husband got really sick, and I didn't think he'd recover, and all of my priorities in life shifted. I stopped streaming entirely for around three months. And when I returned to Twitch, something didn't feel quite right. With all of the above considered around the conversation of business value, I didn't look forward to going live like I used to; whilst live streaming I felt like I was failing at my job — failing at delivering value. And then, the mental and physical exhaustion of the events that unfolded surrounding my husband's illness hit me hard. My body gave up. I could no longer use my hands without debilitating pain. I thought this would be a great opportunity for "content", however (like a fool). I live streamed learning to code with my voice, and it was, without exaggeration, a living hell. Talking simultaneously to a captive audience whilst learning how to talk to a machine whilst being in excruciating pain was so incredibly abhorrently vile I wouldn't recommend it to my worst enemy. (Not that I have enemies, mind you.) And so I took another break: mainly because I handed in my notice at Sentry to take some time to recover from all of this pain and exhaustion, to try and practise self-care, and to try and get my life together and my health back.

A month later, I started a new role as Head of Developer Education at Nordcraft. Whilst I went live a few times at the start of my job to share this new and exciting developer tool with the world, something still didn't feel right. I couldn't stop hearing those words in my head: "We pay your salary to work for this company. We don't pay you to have fun on Twitch." Now, obviously these words have not been uttered at Nordcraft and the people I work with are truly very wonderful, but I have more responsibility in this role than I have had in previous roles, and this company is a small start-up of just nine people, and therefore time in the workday is precious. Additionally, I am now a one-person department with many other responsibilities and priorities that just haven't afforded me the time to put everything aside and hang out on Twitch for four hours at a time to maintain that elusive viewership.

I am so incredibly grateful for everything that streaming on Twitch has given me. I have built a network of talented friends in technology; I have become an international speaker; I built a whole ridiculous game played via my Twitch chat; I built some truly silly and fun projects; I pivoted my entire career; and I made friends for life. But, alas, it is time to move on to the next chapter.

On Thursday 18th December 2025, I will be going live on Twitch for the last time. I will also be ceremoniously turning off my Twitch bot (which will save me £84 a year) and will be making the code open source.

Thank you, everyone, for coming on this journey with me.

Let's play p4nth3rworld one last time.

I guess this time the game really does stop, when the stream ends.