Arthur Andrade Built an ASMR YouTube Channel Where He Codes in Silence

Arthur Andrade got into custom keyboards — and ended up making YouTube videos about coding.

The path from one to the other made sense to him. While researching keyboard switches and keycaps, he found himself watching ASMR content about keyboards. That gave him an idea: the same format could work for software development. "I find it relaxing to have some kind of programming video on my second monitor," he says. "The keyboard sounds allow me to focus and get in the zone." The one thing missing from those videos, he noticed, was a visible keyboard. He built a channel — ASMR Dev — to fix that.

In this story, Andrade, a Senior Fullstack Engineer who has been at X-Team for almost four years, walks through how he built the production setup for ASMR Dev, why he chose LeetCode as the channel's subject matter and how he thinks about balancing content creation with his day job.

From Idea to First Video: More Tinkering Than Expected

Getting ASMR Dev off the ground took longer than Andrade anticipated — not because of the concept, but because of the setup.

He tested the idea first with his Discord community. "Everybody loved the idea," he says. But translating that enthusiasm into a working video required solving several technical problems from scratch. His main microphone had a noise filter that stripped out the keyboard sounds he was specifically trying to capture, so he had to experiment with alternatives. He eventually settled on a Lavalier microphone for the first video, then upgraded later to a dedicated dynamic mic he sourced on AliExpress.

The camera angle took even more work. Andrade wanted an overhead shot of the keyboard — not a talking-head setup, but a bird's-eye view that let viewers see and hear the keyboard build in action. He rigged a secondary arm to position his DSLR camera over his monitor and directly above the keyboard, then fine-tuned the crop and ratio in OBS until it was right.

His current main keyboard is an aluminum K2 Keychron with what he describes as "a lot of mods, creamy yellow switches, and blackout keycaps." He rotates keyboards and doesn't have a single go-to for the videos — the channel started, in part, because he wanted to test and show his keyboard builds to the world.

A Process Built for Authenticity

Once the setup was sorted, Andrade developed a consistent production routine — one designed around genuine problem-solving, not polished performance.

Before recording, he gets the lighting right and closes all doors and windows to isolate the audio. He turns on the keyboard mic, checks its position in the overhead frame, sets the audio levels and puts on instant feedback through his headset so he can monitor the keyboard sounds in real time. Then he opens a VM, picks a keyboard and mouse combination, and hits record.

The key decision in the process is that he doesn't prepare the LeetCode problems in advance. He wants them to serve as a refresher for himself. "So if I make a mistake, it's all on the video," he says. While working through each problem, he types slowly — deliberately — so the keyboard sounds are more pronounced and the switches have room to be heard clearly.

He chose LeetCode because it's the platform he's most familiar with for coding challenges and because it gave the channel a clear, useful identity. "I'd already been wanting to do a full walkthrough of the LeetCode problems on camera, but thought it would be boring to just have me explaining the problems," he says. "Combined with the ASMR, it felt fresh. They're videos that even people who don't care about LeetCode problems can watch." His goal is to cover as many challenges as possible, working through them in order to mix difficulty levels and data structure types. The channel is meant to be something viewers can use for interview prep — a study resource with an unusually calming delivery format.

His favorite type of challenge to solve is the sliding window problem. "I often visualize the window in my head while solving it," he says.

A Hobby Treated Like a Hobby

Andrade is deliberately relaxed about ASMR Dev. There's no posting schedule. No growth target. No pressure to produce at any particular pace.

"I'm pretty laid-back with the new channel," he says. "It's a fun project. I don't wanna spoil it with a strict schedule. It's a hobby and that's how I'll treat it." He was also changing X-Team clients around the time of the interview, heading into a large new project that he expected would absorb most of his focus for the following months — meaning ASMR Dev would be on the sidelines for a while. That's fine with him. The channel gets better when he's relaxed about it, not when he's forcing output.

His advice to new or aspiring content creators reflects the same philosophy: "Done is better than perfect. Just get your videos out there; don't agonize over making them perfect." He acknowledges it's advice he hasn't fully mastered himself — but the fact that ASMR Dev exists at all suggests he's at least applying the first part.

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