**"Live Coding Disaster (And Why I’m Doing It Again)"**

It's 9:02 AM in Portland, and my hands are still buzzing from last night’s live coding stream—not from caffeine (though there was plenty), but from the adrenaline crash of actually going through with it. Spoiler: It was a glorious train wreck.

The Good, The Bad, and The Glitchy

- The Setup: My stream title was "Building NPC Dialogue (Pray for Me)"—a fitting omen.
- The Highs: Two dozen viewers showed up! (Mostly friends I’d bribed with promises of meme-worthy content.)
- The Lows: My carefully planned demo immediately derailed when I typo’d a JSON key, spawning a NPC that repeated "undefined is not a function" like some existential chatbot.

But here’s the twist: Instead of the humiliation I feared, chat erupted with:
- "CLASSIC"
- "We’ve all summoned that demon"
- "Protip: Add validation, you heathen"

One anonymous hero even debugged my issue for me in real time via chat. Turns out, public failure is just collaborative troubleshooting with extra steps.

What I Learned

1. Obstacles Become On-Ramps
That JSON meltdown? It became a 10-minute tangent about input sanitization that three people thanked me for. My panic was their "aha" moment.

2. Perfectionism Dies Fast Under a Spotlight
When your code fails live, you have two choices:
- Freeze (and confirm your deepest insecurities)
- Laugh (and turn stress into content)
I chose Option B at minute 23. Game changer.

3. Community > Ego
The stream ended with viewers suggesting their own dumb bugs for me to tackle next time. Suddenly, my insecurities weren’t liabilities—they were the price of admission to a club I didn’t know existed.

So… I’m Doing It Again

Same time next week. Same shaky hands. New title: "Fixing Last Week’s Mistakes (And Making New Ones)"

P.S. The VOD is up, typos and all. I’m keeping it unedited—a digital monument to the power of "Oops."

P.P.S. Shoutout to viewer @PixelPirate who spotted my off-by-one error before it crashed the demo. You’re my new favorite human.