What is Live Coding Happy Hour?
The ServiceNow eco system is full of acronyms. If you’ve heard of or seen the acronym LCHH, but don’t know what it is, this post will explain...
LCHH is short for Live Coding Happy Hour.
What is Live Coding Happy Hour? It is a live-coding presentation, typically streamed on YouTube and Twitch, where the presenters try to complete a task while sipping on a beverage - sometimes alcoholic and sometimes not.
Live coding means that the presentation is unscripted, and usually unrehearsed. It is not a polished demo. Sometimes things don’t work as expected. That’s part of the fun. Sometimes the presenters run into something that they haven’t figured out how to do, and they try to figure it out on the spot. Sometimes they figure it out; sometimes they don’t.
So why should you be interested in LCHH?
Learn from an experienced developer
The downside to LCHH is that you get less content fit into the hour than you would in a scripted demo. In LCHH, some of that hour may be spent clicking around the platform trying to figure out something new.
The upside is that you get to see a developer’s thought process and learn debugging techniques - from the experts themselves!
Tune-in live, participate, and have fun
If you tune-in live (and I recommend you do, if you can), then you get to participate in the chat, feel like a part of the community, and maybe even offer assistance. If the presenter gets stuck on something, the audience members chime in the chat with suggestions. It’s a great way for you to participate and help solve problems together. Crack a beverage of your choosing while you’re at it.
Be humbled and encouraged
The presenters, usually ServiceNow Dev Advocates, are truly a brave bunch. It’s not easy doing an unrehearsed presentation. But you can still get all kinds of insight from them..
There are always multiple presenters and it’s interesting to hear the banter between them. One person may be used to doing something one way while the other does it differently, not realizing that there is an alternative.
It can be both humbling and encouraging to learn that even experienced ServiceNow developers (and even ServiceNow employees!) don’t know everything about the platform. We shouldn’t expect ourselves to know everything either, but attending LCHH is a great opportunity to keep learning and improving.
If you can attend the live stream, as of the publishing of this post, LCHHs are happening on Thursdays at 5:30pm EST over the summer. They were on Fridays and may revert back to Fridays at some point. Subscribe to the ServiceNow Dev Program’s YouTube channel to keep up with when they are.
If you’re not able to attend the live stream of LCHH, they’re all recorded so you can watch them anytime. You can find all the recordings on the ServiceNow Dev Program’s LCHH playlist including Part 1 and Part 2 of the episodes where LCHH was temporarily renamed to Lady Coding Happy Hour, hosted by the female Developer MVPs 2021.
But I do recommend dropping into the live session every once in a while, or regularly, if you can make it.
