Last month I stopped by the NHS Hack Day event in London, whereby a group of 40-50 or so coders, data scientists and healthcare professionals were beavering away to try and make things better for patients and employees in the NHS.

Due to the severe time restraints of a hackathon, I often suspect that the real value of them comes after the weekend has passed.  How many of the projects become an acorn by which mightier tools emerge?

Whilst there were a good number of projects that pledged to make their code open source, this has the limitation of only showing the finished product.  Of course, you can, and should, leave plenty of comments throughout your code to document your thoughts, sometimes it would be nice to be able to look over your shoulder as you code and really delve into your thoughts.

Such a practice has been growing in popularity in the developer world, with coders taking a DIY approach to recording their coding sessions and making them available online.

Asciinema is hoping to make the whole process slightly more polished.  They’re offering a free, open source platform to allow users to record their coding directly from their machines and upload them to the web as a text based video that people can copy.

Of course, it’s not a new approach, and is a slightly easier version of the popular screen recording apps that have been around for a few years now.  Where the service really stands out however is by making the videos text only, so other users can easily copy and paste code from the videos into their own editors.

The ease of use of the platform is another big tick in its favor, with a few short commands all it takes to install and begin operating the software.

Viewers of each video can replay the coding session in real time, pausing at any point should they wish to collect their thoughts or transfer the code to their own editor.

Each video is archived on the platform to hopefully make it easy for others to find, and build upon, pre-existing works.

It’s easy to see such a platform being used to teach people how to code, but also for those of an open source mindset to more effectively share both their coding but also their process with others.

Check out the promo video for the site below for more information.