Learning Through Video
Mike Crittenden wrote a post this morning about how he hates learning through videos. I know for myself that I occasionally do prefer videos for learning new things, but not always.
Usually if I need to learn something, it would be some new technology that I have to know for my job. In those cases, I find that if I have absolutely no experience in the subject matter, a good video which provides a decent overview of the major concepts helps me a great deal. Trying to learn the same thing from reading a lengthy blog post, especially when jargon is used, is less effective for me. I find myself getting tired and loosing my place. Now, this could just be because of the writing — dry blocks of text are the worst, but I tend to do better if the posts are shorter and formulated more like a tutorial.
If there is a video, I generally prefer them to be delivered in the style of a lecture or presentation. Slides that I can look at while the presenter is speaking are fine, but motion graphics or a live demo is better, especially if the subject is complex enough to warrant them. But in either case, I need something visual that I can actually watch. Having someone simply talk to the camera really doesn’t work for me, and makes watching the video more of a hassle (although it’s slightly better if I just listen to the audio).
Once I’ve become proficient in the basics, learning through video become less useful to me and a decent blog post or documentation page works better. By that time, my learning needs become less about the basics and more about something specific, like how to do a particular thing or details of a particular item. At that point, speed is more important to me, and I prefer to have something that I can skim and search in my own time, rather than watch videos that tend to take much longer.
So that’s how and when I prefer to learn something from video. I’ll close by saying that this is my preferred approach when I need to learn something for work. If it’s during my downtime, either a video or blog-post is fine, so long as my curiosity is satisfied.
A pretty good introduction about the fundamentals of Kubernetes, and also the post in question here.
I was ask today by someone at work1 if I knew of a good post describing the fundamentals of Kubernetes. I remember reading one several months ago which explained the fundamentals quite well to me, and thought it would be helpful for this person as well. But I forgot to bookmark the link.
I probably should have realised at the time that it would have been a good post to bookmark. I guess I was hoping to rely on the browser’s history, but as far as I can tell, the history in Vivaldi only goes back three or four months. I felt the post was useful enought to spend some time finding it again.
As you can imagine, doing a straight search for anything on Kubernetes in either Google or DuckDuckGo would result in nothing helpful, since there are roughly a bajillion posts on Kubernetes out there on the internet. But I did remember that the author actually released a simple, for-pay image sharing application, and announced it on Hacker News.
So I did a DuckDuckGo search for “site:ycombinator.com image hosting single person.” Amazingly the Hacker News post was the top hit. This eventually led me to the app in question, which eventually led me to this person’s blog, and after one more DuckDuckGo search, eventually to the post itself.
It took a good 20 minutes find this post once more, and I was honestly unsure whether I would have been about to find it at all. I’m bookmarking it now so that it may never2 be lost again.
Finished reading: Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod 📚
Another book full of thought provoking advice that could be read in a weekend.
Hard to get out of old habits. I’ve started reading Indie Microblogging by Manton today. So far a terrific read — which natually means that I stopped so that I can save it for “later”. Really need to just finish reading what I find interesting now.
This is by far the most useful quick action I’ve made in Automator. It generates a UUID, and places it in the pasteboard. I’ve got it bound to Ctrl+Opt+Cmd+U and I’ve been using it constantly over the last week (writing a lot of tests with test data).
I think it’s time to close the “Untitled Summer Project”, the service I was working on to upload files to S3 for publishing on Drummer.
The goal — despite not being entirely public — was to have a service that could be used by others to upload images to S3 for the purpose of publishing them to their blog, particularly blogs published using Drummer and served through Old School. I was hoping to have something that I could share with others by the end of Summer.
Well, now it’s Autumn, and I’ve made very little progress on it since early February. So it’s time to cut my losses and shut it down.
I think there were a number of factors that resulted in the failure of this project:
- I wasn’t using it enough to get excited about it. I mean, I was using to manage my uploaded pictures for workingset.net, but I was only doing so occasionally.
- Apart from not using it, I wasn’t getting much out of the project itself. There wasn’t anything exciting about the project from a purely coding standpoint (apart from doing image resizing in the browser using WASM, which might come in handy for some other projects), and if I was getting nothing from using the project myself, there was no other intrinsic motivation to continue working on it.
- I was planning to move on from Drummer and Old School as a blogging platform. I figured giving write.as a try, which also has image hosting, so there was no real need for it anymore.
I think what I need to do for any project that I hope to share with others, I need to share it with others much earlier than when I was originally planning to. I think that feedback from others using it is important for driving the project forward, particularly if I am not getting that drive from using it myself.
Here’s another clip of the echidna, taken from the same 2 minute video I took yesterday. It’s also the third video of wildlife looking for food that I’ve posted on this blog. Is a trend forming I wonder? 🤔
Went for my afternoon walk yesterday, and saw an echidna looking for food. That doesn’t happen every day, so it seemed like a good subject for a video.
Wondering if I could part with A$ 10,000.00 on a souped up Mac Studio. Very tempting, but that’s a fair bit of money.
I’m looking for a new CMS for my side-project journal, which is currently on Drummer and Old School. I’m looking at write.as as a possible contender, and so far it looks promising.
My printed Day One journals for 2021 have arrived, much quicker than I expected. They came out nicely. I think paper covers are the way to go — they feel much better to flip through than the hard cover one I have for 2020.
I was reminded about the post on streaming apps by John Siracusa when I was browsing Apple Maps today. Do you know that after a search, it takes three taps to dismiss the sidebar, reveling the actual thing I want to see — the map? Do these taps count as “engagement”? 😒
Some More Updates of Broadtail
I’ve made some more changes to Broadtail over the last couple of weeks.
The home page now shows a list of recently published videos below the currently running jobs.
Clicking through to “Show All” displays all the published videos. A simple filter can be applied to filter them down to videos with titles containing the keywords (note: nothing fancy with the filter, just tokenisation and an OR query).
Finally, items can now be favourited. This can be used to select videos that you may want to download in the future. I personally use this to keep the list of “new videos” in the Plex server these videos go to to a minimum.
We had a bit of rain last night so the Currawongs were out in force today. It’s always a pleasure listening to their calls, especially when they’re singing in chorus.
Super busy week this week. A couple of long days, with a bunch of long design and planning meetings that my voice is now hoarse.
But only a couple of hours left, then I can wind down with a walk, and a listen to the latest Incomparable Game Show. I earnt it this week!
Slack’s not great for resolving arguments.
I’m in one now at work. Nothing heated, just a disagreement about a certain design choice. But the ability to post short, sharp responses — not to mention the inherent satisfaction that would come from doing so — adds the possibility of making the whole situation descend to the point where it becomes just like a Twitter-storm. It takes effort to avoid that from happening. It took me effort to do so today.
Maybe something like an “argument” mode would help. When enabled, you can no longer make short posts and are force to write longer ones, maybe with a minimum character count of say 1000 or so. The post will also be delayed by about 15 minutes so that when you do slam a reply out, you have the opportunity to cool off, and reword it.
Two things in life there’s never enough of: time, and available USB ports.
Speaking of nice development experiences, I took a look at the Playdate SDK yesterday. Docs and tools are really well polished. Managed to get a “Hello World” style “game” built and running in the simulator in about 30 minutes. My pixel artwork skills need work though. 🤦
Time and Money
Spending a lot of time in Stripe recently. It’s a fantastic payment gateway and a pleasure to use, compared to something like PayPal which really does show its age.
But it’s so stressful and confusing dealing with money and subscriptions. The biggest uncertainty is dealing with anything that takes time. The problem I’m facing now is if the customer chooses to buy something like a database, which is billed a flat fee every month, and then they choose to buy another database during the billing period, can I track that with a single subscription and simply adjust the quantity amount? My current research suggests that I can, and that Stripe will handle the prorating of partial payments and credits. They even have a nice API to preview the next invoice which can be used to show the customer how much they will be paying for.
But despite all the documentation, test environments, and simulations, I still can’t be sure that it will happen in real life, when real money is exchanged in real time. I guess some real life testing would be required. 💸