When I watched it a couple months ago, I did not know that this was the Minecraft developer (I think it was before Minecraft was released). The video is and was probably the most inspiring thing on the power of creative programming I've ever seen. His ability to iterate and iterate and create something out of literally black nothingness. When you see him doing the artwork, you're like woah - he does his own graphics too!
I'm a writer and I feel inadequate after watching his coding sessions. If I could write like he codes, I'd be putting Stephen King to shame by the end of the week.
I hope to god this isn't just a prodigy stage in his game developing abilities.
Just as a piece of context, this video was created as part of a competition called Ludum Dare. LD is a competition where a bunch of indie devs and hobbyists get together and make something in a short time frame (48 hours in this case) and share what they made.
Sadly a live feed of my programming session this weekend would include a tab over to HN every ten minutes to see what is going on... noprocrast is sooo needed for me - but I just can't do it...
Just do it. Do it now, right when you read this post. It's completely worth it. It's just not worth it to come here and read articles about how to be productive and then not end up doing anything because you're on HN. I did it a few months ago and never looked back.
You know what - I just did it. I know my productivity yesterday was shot - let's see what today brings. Thanks for that little verbal push - I may have actually needed that.
I found myself wasting far too much time on reddit. I ended up creating a for-work account that is only subscribed to /r/programming, /r/math, and a few others that are technically useful. (no /r/reddit.com, /r/pics, /r/funny, etc.).
So far it's been a few weeks, and I've found myself to be much less distracted when I have more important things to be doing.
HN doesn't seem to be as much of a time-sink (slower churn and narrower focus help, here). I might turn off the notifo integration, though.
"Stones" is slang for "balls" is slang for "testicles," which are attributed (metaphorically) to be the source of bravery. Acts of great bravery are said to require loins of great fortitude, viz. "balls of steel."
It's not the first or the last. I believe he's doing this for the Ludum Dare, a game making contest of sorts. A lot of people who participate do this same thing, and have done it in the past.
The chat seems to suggest that this isn't actually live. Apparently it is just looping a video of him coding at some point in the past. The "Live Steaming" text will be red, not gray, when he it is actually streaming live.
Notch is in Sweden (GMT + 1) and your comment was made while he was fast asleep. He codes most of the day his time, which is most of the night for America. You're seeing a loop because he's asleep -- well he was when you were commenting.
A question highly related to this: If I was interested in recording myself while coding what program would you recommended? It doesn't have to support live streaming. The only real requirements are that I could turn it on and forget about it safely (not running my computer out of memory) and that it is of good enough quality that you can read text. I use Ubuntu.
Too bad, Notch just announced that he's giving up. His entry to Ludum Dare 19 won't be finished, but the source code of what he did so far can be found here:
The javadoc reference for Random() notes "This constructor sets the seed of the random number generator to a value very likely to be distinct from any other invocation of this constructor."
If you click on the video to go to the livestream.com page for him, you can see his recent recordings including today's where he was working on some dungeon game apparently. It's the left most video.
Just out of interest, what features in IntelliJ make it a better environment than Eclipse? I've been working on a GWT/GAE app and Eclipse seemed like the natural choice given that there are Google plugins available. We're starting a new Java (Drools/Hibernate/some kind of WS framework) project soon - are we likely to get much benefit out of purchasing some IntelliJ licenses?
IntelliJ is expensive. IntelliJ makes refactoring simple. For example, we got acquired by a company and were forced to rename our com.origcompany to com.newcompany. In one project that was several thousand class files. IntelliJ did it in about a minute. Eclipse crashed somewhere after twenty minutes. I actually had to use Eclipse because Flex Builder would only run on Eclipse Ganymede. I lost many minutes of my life waiting for Flex Builder to build. I don't know if that was a consequence of Flex Builder's mxmlc performance but I do know that Eclipse completely froze on our Windows machines a few times a day. For a team trying to get a app done, we unofficially acknowledged that Eclipse was an impediment. The major drawbacks to IntelliJ is that Git support is poor. I would recommend just doing stuff from the command line for Git. We use SVN. My general feeling with IntelliJ is that it is a very polished product that I've been using since 2000 (before that we used the awesome Visual Slickedit). In Eclipse, I found that simple stuff that you may do often isn't optimized (for example, reference or string searching) - in IntelliJ it is cached. In Eclipse, searching always took forever (I should have attempted to look for a searching plugin). My best analogy is that IntelliJ is a BMW and Eclipse is a minivan. Both work, one is better performance and more tuned. One is feature rich.
Came in for the coding. Left it open for the music (although I peek now and then, but since it's so low-res that I can't actually read any code, there's almost no point in doing that)
The amount of work this guy can get done by just sitting down and working non-stop is incredible.