Author: Kyle Cordes

Where I work at Oasis Digital, we teach a mix numerous (mostly advanced, developer-oriented) workshop classes. Historically these were mostly in-person, since March 2020 they are all online for obvious reasons.

For online sessions we’ve used various meeting tools, including Zoom, Google Meet, Blue Jeans, and others I’ve forgotten. Sometimes a customer’s IT department has our default choice blocked, we are always on the lookout for alternatives.

Continue reading “Microsoft Teams for online classes?”

This post is part of a series on demonstrating competence and expertise on video:

• Technical setup
• Process
• Content (this post)
• Promotion (coming sometime)

Your goal is results, not Minutes Watched

YouTube is full of videos that take 10+ minutes to deliver 30 seconds of information. Why? Because this content is on channels that make money by showing ads. They need each video to be at least 10 minutes, and more minutes watched means more ad revenue.

But that’s not the context I’m writing about. This post series is about demonstrating expertise and competence on video:

Continue reading “Design your content for effective video”

This post is part of a series on demonstrating competence and expertise on video:

• Technical setup
• Process (this post)
• Content
• Promotion

Create an outline

Outline your video in some detail, and make that outline visible (either on your screen, or printed on paper) during your video recording. Not too much detail, though; the outline shouldn’t take long, perhaps just a few minutes.

Then iterate on the outline, and get feedback from others if the video is important or if you are new to this kind of content. Rearranging text in an outline is tremendously easier than re-recording or video editing, so make the most of this stage.

Continue reading “A small-scale, mostly-one-take video production process”

This post is part of a series on demonstrating competence and expertise on video:

• Technical setup (this post)
• Process
• Content
• Promotion

So you want to show expertise and competence on video…

Recording a technical talk? Creating a video about a management tool, to be used as an advertisement for consulting services? Working on the perfect conference talk for an online conference, hoping to gain another 1000 Twitter followers among the community using a library you work on?

These are all cases where demonstrating competence and expertise in a video, to an audience who can leave with one click at any moment, pays off. Here are tips I have found around the web and from my experience.

Continue reading “Audio-video setup for meetings and videos”

I was thinking today, observing how our multiple teams (spread across many customer projects) at Oasis Digital and Expium collaborate. There is an interesting pattern of collaboration that spans the very different types of work at these two firms I’m involved in.

For background, the work at Expium is all about Atlassian products, and the work at Oasis Digital often touches Angular in some way, in conjunction with other full-stack technologies, because we are most well-known for Angular. I don’t think today’s thought really depends to any specific technology, but I’ll tell it from a software development point of view.

We have been using Angular for about as long as it is possible to do so. We started back in the Alpha sequence and have built a great amount of code for many customers since then. We’ve trained thousands of developers. And personally, I have written a lot of Angular code, including code used in teaching Angular Boot Camp, which means it is example code, very heavily scrutinized and polished.

Continue reading “Coding together – continuous technical community”