The Real Reason I Went Silent for 7 Months

Is this is this thing on? Hey folks, it's been a little while. I haven't been making videos for quite some time. I think at this point it's been almost 7 months or so. It's been since March and I guess it's uh first day of November now. So, I haven't been making YouTube videos on this dev leader channel. And that's not because I was planning on abandoning it or anything like that. I think there's just been a ton of change. So, as that's been going on and I've been working and trying to figure out how I want to kind of take this forward, I really needed to take some time to actually sit down, understand how things are changing, and then figure out what kind of place I want in all of this. So, I wanted to make this video sort of just to reintroduce what I've been focused on, why I've had some time away from making videos, what I've been doing otherwise in terms of content, and then where I plan on taking all of this going forward. So, no, this isn't going to be a deep dive into anything super technical. Just a little bit of background, catch you guys up on what I've been doing and for me to kind of get my ideas out there so you understand where I'm headed with all of this. So, to kick things off, I think that towards the beginning of this year, not only do we have a lot of changes with AI, right? Like tons of AI scare, but the tooling, I would say the tooling has and is continuing to evolve rapidly. We have models coming out like every day that are, you know, twice as good as the models the day before. Um, all of the harnesses and tools and things that we use are changing all of the time. Uh, and I would really, you know, if I look back at the beginning of this year especially, there was so much change that almost seemingly like not maybe not every day, but like week to week, I'm like, man, whatever I was learning last week and trying to focus on, it's we're in a different direction now where we're 10 steps further. It's a lot. So, we had this going on at the beginning of the year and then I think it would be uh unfair of me to say that like things like work weren't taking a lot out of me. So when I make other content, so I have another YouTube channel called Code Commute that I keep up with still very very regularly. Those videos are almost like this one where I'm just kind of talking to a camera. So loweffort um it's just kind of what I'm thinking, right? I didn't even for this video on my whiteboard I have a couple of notes where I'm like try to make sure you talk about these, but this is just a stream of consciousness and code commutees very much like that. So on code commute there's a lot more sort of background on whether I'm going through burnout things like that and I I would definitely attribute a lot of my you know focus away from this channel uh to things like work which I mean that's kind of how it is uh based on the type of work I do managing engineering teams working in a space with a very large live service working in a space that is very much security focused there's been a lot there's just been a lot for me to stay on top of work is a priority for me and that's what pays the bills of course and so that detracts from I would say the amount of energy that I have into things like making YouTube videos. Code commute like I said was just low effort. I record them in the car when I'm driving to work. I upload them. We're done. These videos generally get edited. There's thumbnails and things like that. I'm going to come back to this in a moment. Um but there's just more overhead. And if we think about the type of videos that are on this channel, traditionally this is a lot more tutorial-based, right? So if you've come to my channel in the past, it's probably because there were things like C tutorials where I'm guiding you through how to build things, that kind of stuff. And that actually does take a lot of setup. I need to come up with the scenario, the topic, put it all together, make sure that it's working first, make sure that I have it kind of laid out for how I want to be able to teach you about it, and then do it, right? And that means that not only are there going to be hiccups along the way, I'll have to re-record whatever else is going on, but there's a lot more that goes into one of those videos, even when I had someone else editing them. And he was absolutely a tremendous help with getting all of my videos done. I don't think I could have stayed on top of it without him. So, um, the work part in the beginning of this year especially, huge toll on me. I think the fact that there was so much going on with AI, how that was evolving and still is was kind of making me wonder like I don't really understand if it's going to make sense for me to continue the same types of C videos I've been making. And that's not to say I'm abandoning C. I still have my agents coding in C all the time. It's just that the value that I think some of those tutorials were bringing before maybe is less valuable. Maybe the same types of people who were coming for those tutorials are just like, "Hey, I'll have my agent doing it." Maybe the way that people are actually writing code now does not lend itself as well to like diving into a tutorial uh specifically on some of the language features. So, I think that tutorials may still make sense. Like I said, I'm not giving up on C or anything like that. I think that I have to change how I'm approaching putting those tutorials together because if I'm showing you, for example, here's me in Visual Studio clicking through doing these things, pressing the play button, like I feel like that world is behind us now. And when I say that, I've mentioned this on Code Commute many times. And if you've joined my live streams that I have on one of my other channels, the Dev Leader Podcast, if you've joined those, I have said that I don't think I've opened Visual Studio in months, right? And this is coming from someone I I mean this seriously. I've been programming in C for I don't know like 15 years or something maybe around that. Um and I love using Visual Studio historically. I'm not a terminal person. I'm not the kind of person that's like, "Hey, like watch me use uh this terminal." Like I don't use a guey because I'm I'm a, you know, elite programmer. No, like I love a user interface. I love clicking around and being able to to navigate code and and projects like that. But the way that the AI tools have been evolving, it is significantly more u beneficial or effective for me to be using terminals. Like again, I don't love saying that because I am the kind of person that loves a gooey, but that's where we're at. So, I think that a lot of that has changed for me and that me putting together tutorials the way that I have just simply does not make sense. I have to find a better way to be able to do that. So, beginning of this year, I would say lots of burnout. That's kind of been continuation. Um, AI has been kind of changing the landscape and terms of how I think I want to start being able to to show content. And then I think the other part related to AI that's important to mention is that I I want people to be able to come to my channel and learn from the experiences I have because I want to be able to teach those. But I don't want to come from a position of like I don't know what I'm talking about, but you know, click the thumbnail and come watch me talk about whatever. and it's like I'm trying to take advantage of you for getting your views. Like that's not that's not why I make the channel. I want to be able to help. And I feel that as I was going through a lot of the initial like rapidly changing AI tooling, um just this whole shift that it's almost like not fair for me to to to try and bring you to my channel to teach you about it because and I mean this sincerely, like it's hard for me to keep up with it. And so me trying to teach you while I'm not even keeping up myself, I just don't think is fair. Uh, and I said this on again on a live stream not too long ago that even for putting out courses on dome train, right? I'm I'm a dome train author. Uh, I've really enjoyed putting together courses for Nick Chapsis and I I just have not been doing that. One of the ideas I had was, hey, I think a course that would do really well is something around AI development. And I think that right at the beginning of this year, I was like, "Hey, how do I how do I get in on this? How do I start trying to put some courses course material together on this?" And I remember stopping myself going like, "You're not in a position to to teach people about this." Like quite frankly, it it's like again that that would be like manipulative if I were trying to convince people, hey, come come check out what I'm doing like a pay money for this course. Like yeah, maybe it would be great. and I could make money from that, but I also felt like that would be the wrong thing to do. It just not I'm not in a position to be able to do that. And I think now that it's been, you know, again, since I think roughly February is when I really started to to go heavy into using something like Copilot CLI for a lot of the work I'm doing. Since then, it's been heavy every single day building things. And I think at this point, again, not to jump into courses necessarily, but I think at this point, I feel like I can I can talk to my audience about here's how I'm building software, the things that are working, the things that aren't, and I feel like I have knowledge and experience to be able to offer. Again, this stuff is all rapidly changing. It's all new. I can't claim, oh, I'm a a veteran AI developer. No, that would be bull crap. So, I want to be able to start positioning some material for this. I think one more thing that I want to mention is that and I'm I don't know. I feel like on dev leader, one of the things I want to do aside from just kind of walking people through, you know, um like technical tutorials or like here's how to do things or like the the more technical side of software engineering. I also want to give you sort of the other side of software engineering which is this human element right so I do have other videos that aren't technical tutorials that kind of thing and I've made videos on burnout or whether it's like you know communication interacting with others at work I want to make sure that you're able to get that kind of thing too so I wanted to mention this because I I think this is important I've noticed that for myself when I'm building with AI Um, I I don't I don't even know the right words or like psychology to describe it, but when I'm building things, it's almost like I can't I can't walk away. I don't know if any of you have had that experience, but again, I wanted to say this out loud because I think it's important now that we have the ability to be able to put together things rapidly. Um, I've been able to play around with different ideas where I'm like, "Hey, I've been thinking about this for a long time." Or even if I haven't, here's a new idea. I can go over to clawed code or co-pilot CLI in a couple of prompts. I'm off to the races building something and then I get a little bit of that teaser where I'm like, "Oh, like it's it's actually coming together like one more prompt or like one more feature or can we try this?" And you know, soon enough I have I'm not exaggerating. I have like, you know, 20 co-pilot windows across my screen and I can't walk away to do anything because it's like one more prompt. just let me get one more thing in. Um, it's weird, right? It's a I think there's a weird psych psychological kind of thing going on there, but um, again, I just wanted to say that out loud because I think it's a an interesting dynamic. I'm sure x number of years from now, someone will say, "Ah, here's here's what was happening to all those software engineers during that time." I don't know. Right? So, it's on video, it's recorded now. There's me saying I'm going through some weird stuff when it comes to, you know, building lots of things and feeling like I can't walk away. Um, to bring it back to why I'm making this video, almost to the point where I need enough compute, like CPU on my machine to compile things, I'm doing some game development on the side. So, you know, Blender running in the background. When I'm doing all of these things, there's almost not enough processing on my machine to run OBS to record this video, right? It gets bad enough that I don't want to stop the building that's happening to make a video, which I think is um you know, I don't think that's a good balance of things. So, again, I'm saying all these things out loud because it's a I think an interesting psychological thing going on. But with all that said, where are things going? How do I want to take the channel forward? Um, I think a couple of things, right? So, throughout all of this, I would say like the past seven or eight months kind of thing. Um, I've been building lots uh continuing to build, you know, in C like I have been, I spend a lot of time building brand ghost. So, if you've seen my other social media content on other platforms, if you've noticed, I have shorts going up on my channel. Um, you know, if you see me on Instagram, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Masttodon threads, you name it, right? If you see the content that's going out, that's because of the platform I built called Brand Ghost. So, Brand Ghost is one of the other things that takes up a lot of my time. And uh it it's still kind of standing by the mission that I set out for, which was I have been able to over these past months take my foot off the gas pedal with putting content out. And Brand Ghost is still doing that for me. Um so I've been continuing to invest into Brand Ghost as a side business. And so Brand Ghost is a lot of C development. So I've been having uh AI workflows helping me building Brand Ghost. I have a couple of small games on the side. I have a couple of websites that I'm putting together. I have a couple of sort of different product and projects project ideas that I'm working on. And you might say, "Well, Nick, why why so many things all at once? Like, that's obviously not going to work out." And so, I get it. Um, makes sense. That's probably too many things to juggle. One of the things that um again I I'm standing by when I've talked to people about like how do you get better at programming right if you've seen my other content I will say if you want to be a better programmer program build things spend time doing it like any skill right if you want to get good at something you have to do it right so you can apply this outside of software engineering and programming you want to be good at basketball it's probably not just read a bunch of basketball books and you're you're off to the races being the best basketball player in the world. No, you're going to have to play basketball. And the same thing with coding, you're going to have to build things. If you want to be a better software engineer, spend more time doing software engineering. So, if I want to get better at building things with AI, guess what? I need to spend time doing it. And so, for me, that means not just, hey, like let me use brand ghost as my number one focus and only build brand ghost. that will absolutely help Brando, that will absolutely help me learn. But I also want to apply it to new code bases. I want to apply it to prototyping things. I want to apply it to new languages, to new text stacks, to new types of tools that I can use. I want to apply all of my sort of software engineering experience knowledge to things in this space so that I can try to learn them and be better at them so that I can share that with you. So been building lots of things constantly. I think I'm now at the point where I can say, you know, in a tutorial, hey, you've never used this programming language or this tech stack. Me neither. watch what I have put together, you know, building up to this so that I can jump into a new project like that. You've never built a mobile app, no problem. Let's go see how we can do that with no experience. I want to be able to show you how I'm using AI to do things like that to refactor code bases, to debug things, to be able to tackle things like, you know, front-end web development. So, one of the first videos I'm going to make after this one is showing you how I'm going to restyle and redesign my entire website, and it's a bit weird. Uh, I don't know if other people do it this way, but I found this works quite well for some other things. And I want to show you how I'm going to redesign my website using AI. And I say this as someone who is not very good at front-end web development. So, I have a bunch of ideas like this now that I think that I'm ready to talk about and I'm excited to be able to do that kind of uh bring this channel back to life with more AI based videos. And with that said, if there are certain things, whether it's AI tooling, if there are certain things on, you know, how you're using Claude or C-Pilot or other tools, uh, languages, tech stacks, um, if it's, you know, still C focused and you're like, hey, how do I do this in C#? I still always want to hear from all of you. I still want to know the types of things that the viewers who come to this channel are looking for and I still want to be able to focus on that as much as I can. So, with all of that said, I just wanted to thank you all for still sticking around. This channel's not dead. I just needed some time to kind of regroup, to collect myself, and then be able to have, I feel like, enough different experiences using AI tools to help bring that back to all of you. So, thanks for being here and I will see you in the next video. Take care.