Weekly Update: v2023.7.05

Last week I changed my content strategy to focus on streaming. And I think it worked! Well, at the very least, it got me to sit down and create content for long periods of time.

Is that content worth the same? To be determined. But there's a lot to like.

To start, I set up my new monitor and have gotten to play around with it a bit. It's amazing. I basically use it as three screens; one large and centered and then two auxiliary screens on each side.

When I'm coding alone, I can easily use it as two screens, and when I'm live streaming, I can have content outside the center area that I can easily reference.

All in all, I love it. It's huge.

I do need to get a better webcam setup, though. Currently, I'm using my phone as my main camera for YouTube. And it works well; the camera in my iPhone is amazing (iPhone 14 Pro). But it's a massive pain to set up. And whenever someone wants to do a video call, I also need to set it up so it can be my camera for Zoom.

However, buying a 4k camera isn't cheap, so I'm going to tough it out for a while longer.

Content

I did two (one and two) live streams last week. I'm going to aim for Tuesday and Thursday. Of course, this week, I was out on vacation until Tuesday... so there will only be a single stream.

One thing I've learned is that it does not take a lot of people to be watching and engaged to make a live stream fun. I only need five or so people who are interactive, and then it feels like I'm coding with a bunch of friends.

What I need to get better is working in "videos" into my live stream. This way, I can easily have a video that I pull out of the stream and turn into standalone content. I'm going to try a bit more planning to make this happen so each live stream turns into four pieces of content.

The streams are currently me building end-to-end a time-tracker SaaS app. I'm realizing that there are good nuggets of content and bad. For example, anything other people will encounter is great content to be amplified. The internal workings of time-tracking itself are probably less interesting.

A good flow might be to work on some shared common areas which turn into standalone content and then switch focus and move into specifics of the app itself.

Freelancing

I have a kickoff meeting for a new project in mid-July. After that, I have another project kicking off in August that I think will take about two months.

The summer has been a little slow, but that's not bad. I thought some of these projects would start earlier, so I hadn't been pushing on them too hard. I need to remember things always move slower than I think, so plan accordingly.

That's all for last week! This week is short, but I'm looking forward to upping my content game!