I’m headed out on my own once again, and no, there’s no drama here. Pluralsight has decided to venture into a realm of training that I’m just not qualified for (enterprise) so they were good enough to let me go off and do my own thing again.
I think that’s pretty damn honorable of Aaron and gang. I wish them all the best… Now I get to play…
Once Again, Trying Something Completely New
Pluralsight still owns the Tekpub brand, of course, so I can’t just do that all over again - and honestly I don’t think I want to. It was fun, to be sure, but there’s a sense of “ending something” that I think should just… be. It balances the event in some way.
Over the last few months I’ve been trying some new ideas as well. For instance, I was extremely impressed by the Discover Meteor tutorials. Such a complete experience, top to bottom. The only thing I wish they had was a video to accompany their amazing book.
I also like the idea of sprinkling in some kind of story or narrative. It’s so easy to be cheesy, but at the same time I think dosing a boring technical tutorial with a bit of context is kind of fun.
So that’s what I made for Elixir. I love that language and the vast, amazing OTP framework underneath it. Seriously once you start down OTP, “forever will it dominate your destiny”. Erlang, Elixir - whatever - OTP is brilliant! I just can’t help myself - I like to share this stuff.
Didn’t You Already Make That?
Sort of, but it needed to be updated and prettied up a bit. I love taking my time, refining things until they shine. I think customers feel that at an unconscious level - that you cared enough to sweat every pixel and font choice. The first Red:4 was fine - it looked … OK but I always felt like I could have done more.
So I did - and I added a lot of content on the way..
Yesterday I launched what I’d love to make more of: an elegant tutorial site that’s looks as good as its content. This thing took me months to put together and, I’ll admit, was one of the most frustrating experiences ever.
The first experience was fairly complete, but given some feedback and changes to Elixir, I decided to add:
- Two chapters on debugging
- A complete Github repository with bugs and refactoring that you need to fix
- More OTP as well as troubleshooting OTP
- Ecto and Mix Tasks
There are, of course, lots of fixes as proposed by our intern pool.
Getting It Right Takes Time
Once I realized that my time with Pluralsight was over, I began to freak out a bit. It’s my only job! I had just received a royalty check (they send them out quarterly) so I was good for the next three months - that was a month and a half ago.
I don’t think I ever intended to make a living off of this one site. The tutorial is on Elixir, which is kind of niche these days (but is also amazing seriously you should check it out), so the audience isn’t all that huge. But I want to do other things just like this.
Little sites, one-off domains for a given topic like Node or Career stuff. I think people care about polished material.
Available For Professional Video As Well
I’ve also started working with companies who want to do something a little different for their product videos - getting away from that god-awful ukulele/whistle music, making something relevant to the viewer. Currently I’m helping a company with their help and documentation tutorials - something I wish every company invested in.
So, if you need help that way let me know :). I have plenty of things to keep me busy, and I’m equally excited and terrified for what the next year will bring. Stability, apparently, is not my thing.