REBOOT!
History
I’ve been coding – as a hobbyist – since the 1980’s. But I’d say my programming career actually started around 1998, when I first accepted money for writing code. Make no mistake – the money I received at that time was worth a hell of a lot more than the code I was writing. But I like to think I’ve improved over the years and that my value as a coder is a considerably more commensurate with my current compensation.
I continued coding as a part time second job for a year or two until that late 90’s bubble finally burst. But I was hooked and had learned a lot. I knew coding was in my future in spite of the state of technology jobs at the time. So I continued to study and eventually learned enough that I was writing my own tutorials. This was back in the early days of Flash. My first tutorial was on coding physics and motion graphics. I called it the “Gravity Tutorial” but it covered stuff like velocity, acceleration, gravity, bouncing, friction and mouse interaction (dragging, throwing, catching). I promoted the tutorial on sites like Flashkit and before long it had thousands of views and had been translated into a half dozen different languages. That tutorial was followed up with several others, which led to book deals and speaking engagements and a full time employment as a programmer with a series of increasingly better jobs.
Throughout my career as a programmer, I’ve always taken a two-pronged approach. One is whatever job I happen to have a the time – writing code for a pay check. And the other is education – sharing whatever I’ve learned with other aspiring programmers. It’s been a successful combination and I’ve explored a number of different ways of doing the education part: tutorials, blog posts, open source experiments, books, conference talks, seminars and workshops, and in the last few years, videos.
Actually, over the last six months or so, I’ve really been slacking on the education stuff. I started a new job working with several technologies that I was really not up to snuff on. So I’ve been focusing far more on catching up on that stuff. But by now I’ve gotten to a pretty stable place and I’m feeling the urge to get back into teaching some stuff again.
Videos
While I’ve had a lot of fun making videos, they are a ton of work. First you come up with a subject and write a script. Then you record the audio, record the screencast, edit the audio, edit the video, sync everything up along with any other graphics you might want to add in, prepare the transcript, the title, upload it, prepare all the links and everything else that go on and around the videos, and promote it here and there. A single 15 minute video takes many hours of work. I guess other people can just sit down, hit record, start talking and typing away, finish up and publish. For me, though, a lot more goes into it than that.
Writing
So, in my next phase, I’m going to try going back to plain old writing, making some tutorial-type blog posts right here. I’m still working out some of the technical details, such as code embedding. I was initially thinking of using either codepen or jsbin for embedding interactive examples, but I think I’ve decided to stick with github gists for code only, and screenshots for results. I think my tutorials will wind up with multiple iterations of a single file and having an interactive example for each iteration is going to be heavy and overkill.
$$$?
I’m also trying to come up with some kind of idea of monetization. I don’t want to force people to pay in order to get the content, but in my experience, if you deliver regular doses of quality material, a lot of people are more than happy to voluntarily give something back. And who am I to deny them that opportunity? I’m not really happy with the Patreon model that I used for my Coding Math video series. I got paid once each time I published a video. All of those videos are still getting tons of views on YouTube, and likely will for years to come. But I won’t see another penny from Patreon on any of those views. Advertising is meh. I guess I can just throw up a “tip jar” link and make it really obvious. So that part will just most likely evolve over time. In the end, it’s not about the money, but it’s not NOT about the money, either.
Another idea I’m thinking of is cross publishing on other platforms. Medium is the one that comes to mind initially. I’ve never put anything on Medium. I kind of have mixed feelings about the platform, but it could wind up being a good thing. More eyes on the content, more clicks on the tip jar. One more idea I’ve kicked around is eventually compiling a bunch of articles into a self-published book. My Playing With Chaos book still gets a few sales per month. Enough to keep my Paypal account from bottoming out. 🙂 In fact, I have been planning a follow up book to PWC for quite a while now, but never seem to get around to it. So a lot of the articles I’m thinking of publishing here come from that project’s table of contents.
In closing…
Anyway, I’ve decided to just wipe out the old blog and start fresh here. I may put an archived version of the old blog up eventually. It’s quite old and really needed some severe maintenance anyway. But look forward to seeing some new content around here soon. Hopefully at the pace of an article a week? Maybe more, maybe less. And if you have any ideas or requests, feel fee to comment or otherwise shout at me via some random social network.
Comments? Best way to shout at me is on Mastodon 