An early preview, progress update and more
Hey! Ryan here.
The first update newsletter for my brand new course, GitHub Actions for PHP Developers, has just landed in your inbox.
Before I go any further, I want to thank you for subscribing. I am super excited to release this course and the fact that you're on this list tells me you're interested in the subject matter.
Progress Update
I'm going to be honest with you. Recording a video course is hard work.
From the outside, it seems pretty straight-forward. You figure out what you're going to talk about, bullet point some things and record it.
In reality, it's not that simple. The ideas are right, but when you try that approach as is, it's nearly impossible to be happy with the result.
You can't bullet point your ideas. You need to write a script for each video. Afterwards you prepare the technical parts, like example projects and code snippets. Once you've done that, you need to test all of the code to make sure you're not teaching a bunch of non-sense.
I've also found that I lose the ability to read and speak after hitting record, despite the fact that the script is right in front of me.
Getting over this initial hump is the hardest part of the process though. Now that I've recorded a good chunk of the course, I'm definitely more comfortable and happy with how I'm doing.
I'd estimate that I'm a third of the way through planning, writing, recording and editing. Now that I know the Screenflow shortcuts, I can fly through the editing portion.
The course style
When I'm looking at a course, I like to see shorter videos. Each video should cover a small subset of the overall subject allowing me to quickly watch it when I want to learn, or re-learn, something.
I've taken that exact approach with the course. The majority of the videos will be less than 5 minutes in length. Any videos longer than 5 minutes are only going to be that long for good reason. That reason is normally because it's difficult to break the topic into smaller parts.
Even with those longer videos, you could still watch at 2x speed (another thing I often do) and pick everything up.
Alongside the video length, I want to focus on the task at hand. I've chosen not to share my (beautiful) face with you in the videos. I personally find it really distracting and only helpful when the video is static and nothing is happening.
You won't find a lot of nothing in these videos. I want them to be snappy and straight to the point.
This pattern has paid off well for people like Jeffrey Way, who will only show his face in streams / conferences.
Early preview
Some of you probably want this right away, but I'm putting it in the middle so you're forced to read through at least some of what I wrote above.
This is a small preview from the course itself. I cover the process of getting Psalm running on a Laravel application in the simplest way possible.
There's no fancy stuff going on (in this video), but it does give you an idea of what the videos will be like (speed, length, volume, font size, etc).
So, here you go:
Modules
Now that you've had the juicy stuff, I want to get your thoughts on something.
Initially, I want to release a whole load of videos for you to watch. I want to cover all of the foundational stuff for running with GitHub Actions, but at the same time there is a lot of content that I feel is outside of this scope.
With all of that extra content, I'm wondering whether there is room for additional modules to be released after the initial launch.
I'll mention cost and money now because I understand that it's very important. Small topics would be included free with the initial purchase of the course. Larger / longer topics would incur an additional fee, not close to the original price of the course but a fraction of it.
I'd definitely love to know what you think of this. You can message me on Twitter, or send an email to thoughts@actions-for-php.com. Either way, I'll reply and we can chat about it.
Pricing
The big moment. The big reveal. How much is the initial course drop going to cost you!?
Unfortunately, I've not decided on a price point yet. Naming is hard, recording is hard but pricing is even harder.
For me, I need to ensure that the time spent on the course is paid for inline, or close to, what I could have earned from consulting / contracting.
At the moment, it's hard for me to gauge that because who knows how much time I'm going to spend on it.
Again, I'd love to know how much you'd be willing to pay for the course. Message me on Twitter, or send an email to thoughts@actions-for-php.com, let me know!
Sign off
There we have it, the first newsletter. This was quite a lengthy one but I covered all that I wanted to.
Expect another update in a couple of weeks as I get ready to open up pre-orders for the course and will hopefully give you all a solid, pre-Christmas release date.
Until then, stay safe and look after yourselves.
Ryan <3