I used to play a lot of video games. One was a competitive online multiplayer shooter called Rainbow Six Siege. I really wanted to get better at this game, and one way I could improve was to watch skilled players. This seems so obvious now, but it didn't occur to me at the time.

Watching people who are good at a craft can help you improve your own skills in it. This is especially true when you can watch the expert work and also hear their thought process. This is exactly why watching good players stream on Twitch was a really good idea to improve my own gameplay. I could understand how they think, navigate decisions, and coordinate.

This is the exact reason why I love watching live coding. But there is a catch. I never watch it live. Yes, watching it live I think is a waste of your time because the person doing the stream also has to entertain the viewers. But wait, I said it is good to watch live streams, right? I'll tell you what is even better: watching the VODs. This is because you are now free to watch any part of the stream at your own pace. Most streamers upload their streams after they go offline. These VODs are such a knowledge mine; you can find a lot of things in these videos.

One thing I recently learned is how pointers work in C. I did C in college and thought I had a decent understanding of C. However, when I tried C again recently, I realized that I lacked a solid understanding of many concepts related to memory management. So I started watching stream VODs of people doing C. I learned a lot from this. Seriously, I understood more about pointers from these videos than I did in 4 years of college (Disclaimer: this isn't a dig at the college, it's a dig at me for not trying to learn/study while at college).