A Year of Always Developing

Well, would you believe it? Today marks a year since I started publishing "live" coding sessions on YouTube!

My first video was published on the 8th of April 2021, but I didn't announce it until the 20th of April.

So, how's it going?

Great! 😊

Today I published session 150.

Snippet Pixie: Next - Fix NixOS CI/CD for Wails, remove default SvelteJS UI | Always Developing #150

It's part of my series whereby I'm rebuilding Snippet Pixie with Go. It's the second in the series where I'm also using Wails to build the desktop app with HTML, CSS and Svelte for the front end, and Go for the back end.

To date I've recorded 155 sessions. 152 have been published (there's a couple of #.1 mini sessions), 3 are still being processed by YouTube. It can take multiple days for YouTube to fully process some of my videos as they're recorded in 4k, and can be an hour or so long. And although I could publish them after the initial "SD" processing, which is usually done within an hour or two, because there's a bunch of code on screen, it's better to wait until the "HD" versions are ready.

There's been some ups and downs in the sessions. Many sessions have seen me floundering as I try to learn new technologies, and grapple with some concepts I'm not familiar with. There's also been plenty where I've been amazed at how quickly something came together. That's typical for software development, some days are bad, some are good, and this kind of "warts 'n' all" recording shows that.

To be fair, as I'm recording these sessions first thing in the morning with barely any coffee in my system, I'm not exactly at my best. I generally work much better later in the day, late morning through to late-afternoon tends to be a sweet spot, when non-code tasks are dealt with, I'm relaxed, caffeinated, and can concentrate much easier. That's why I work those hours for Delicious Brains.

I started off the recordings working on a new project, GoalMonitor, but eventually discarded that and switched to the Snippet Pixie rewrite.

Snippet Pixie: Next - Always Developing #60

I recorded 40 sessions while working on GoalMonitor, but am already at 91 for "Snippet Pixie: Next", with 3 more in the can.

GoalMonitor - Svelte + Go + CockroachDB + Juju YouTube playlist

Snippet Pixie: Next YouTube playlist

Are you going to continue with Always Developing?

You bet I am!

I'm really enjoying my daily sessions working on Snippet Pixie, and having these allotted hours for doing so removes the pressure to do it in the evenings.

This means I've had much more relaxed evenings since starting Always Developing, with more time spent catching up with my humongous watch later list on YouTube, reading articles, and some small contributions to some other projects.

Today I did make a couple of changes to the YouTube channel though. I've changed the channel's name to "ianmjones", added my beautiful face as the channel avatar, and updated the custom URL to include "ianmjones".

I did this because it felt very impersonal to have the channel named "Always Developing" and with a logo for the channel avatar. I think that may have been a little off-putting to some people, and it doesn't reflect the very personal nature of my videos. It's also my personal YouTube account, and so if I were to join in the chat for a stream or something, I'd prefer to be known as "ianmjones" rather than "Always Developing".

I'll still be calling the coding sessions "Always Developing", I think it fits, and has been my personal slogan for many years now.

Here's to another 150 or more videos! 😀

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"A Year of Always Developing" was published on April 8, 2022.