Episode 111 Salma Alam Naylor

Did we get Salma onto Fireside just so Richard could learn how to begin his Twitch streaming career? It’s unconfirmed at this point in time. Salma Alam-Naylor is a live streamer, software engineer and developer educator. She streams on Twitch under the moniker “whitep4nth3r” - and she dives into the backstory around this name in the episode (we think it’s great, for the record). Salma gets into it about live streaming, content creation and personality. Over the years, she has carefully built her viewership into a vibrant, supportive community that has her, and each others’ backs. As we learn, her journey began during the first covid lockdown, although unlike whipped coffee and homemade sourdough, her lockdown pastime actually outlasted the pandemic. As someone with backgrounds in coding, performance and teaching, live streaming her coding seemed like the perfect intersection of her talents, and we couldn’t agree more. Although coding isn’t all she does on her stream. Cross-stitching and playing music have also made appearances and yes, her coder heavy audience still shows up for these lives too. This can be understood when Salma goes into what makes people engage with content online. And what’s been obvious to her is that if people connect with someone online, it doesn’t matter what the content is. The audience will follow. Salma tells us about the positives and negatives of Twitch, about the harassment she’s received, but also the incredible support of a community. There also turns out to be more similarities than just the code between streaming and working on a developer team. From a metrics perspective, viewer and subscriber counts can be a tough taskmaster, and it can be a challenge not to judge yourself off of this very stark measure of “success”. Salma’s solution comes from Maya Angelou herself - people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. That metric is hard to quantify, but it’s probably also the best one out there.

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