Sorry that probably sounded confusing - I was being pedantic in my description. In the article I explain that I want private areas on my desktop for watching chat and alert activity hence the crop of my desktop :)
this is a great answer. I have had viewers come in and become very upset that I'm writing javascript in ES5 (usually this is because I'm maintaining a library I wrote many years ago). I have a chat macro to explain why I'm not upgrading the library to ES2015/2017 and hope folks can stay pragmatic and respectful. Besides, I welcome pull requests ;)
> How do you make OBS switch to showing your browser when you open it up to look at docs? Do you manually toggle it in OBS or is there a tool available for this?
I keep things as lazy as possible, and just stream my entire desktop (with slight crop) instead of a specific window. I have my browser window lined up and positioned on the left so the webcam doesn't cover up anything. I then can just CMD-tab to it quickly.
The benefit of this is that folks also see your development flow in a more realistic way, as switching scenes can look slick but departs from how you normally work.
I think showing your process is really important and helpful to those watching your stream. I always show what I'm looking up in my browser. Folks at home are really great at helping me read it, as I'm often talking while trying to skim the docs quickly - not a good combination!
I post a stream reminder to twitter the day before, and just before my stream starts. This has been pretty effective for me. It also helps if you use the #twitch hashtag.
wow, author here. I didn't post this to Hacker News (I didn't even have an account on here until 30 seconds ago), but thanks for the thoughtful comments everyone! Is it weird if I address some of the questions in here or is that odd etiquette? :)