Tech Over Tea - #79 Linux, IT Careers & Being A YouTuber | The Digital Life

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

The Digital Life is always an amazing guest to have on the show, and has some amazing insights into how you can improve your IT career and content production on platforms like YouTube. ==========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDigitalLifeTech Twitter: https://twitter.com/christian_tdl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christian_tdl/ Website: https://www.the-digital-life.com/ ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, good evening. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson, and today we are here for episode 79 of Tech of a T, and we have a returning guest again. Today we are here with Christian Lemper, otherwise known as The Digital Life. Welcome back to the show. And I just realized I was supposed to show your channel while I was saying that, but I didn't. Now you can see the channel. How you doing, man? Awesome. Yeah, I'm fine, thanks. And thank you so much. Yeah. It's awesome to be here again.

No, it's always awesome to talk to you as well. If there's one person I can chat about just random YouTube stuff for two hours and somehow manage to make it interesting, I think that you're definitely on that very very short list yeah i hope so thanks and yeah we did that the last uh days i i think right we yeah and that's that's pretty much what i've got as my topics this time as well so i think that's gonna be what we talk about again awesome great uh but before we get into that, do you know what today is? Today is an important day in the tech world. Really?

Yeah, it is. I have no idea. I probably should have. I didn't think you would. So I'm going to bring up an email. Let's see if we can find it. So I should have brought it up before. Okay, so people can see it on the screen, but you can't see it. So,

I'm going to read this out to you. So, hello everybody out there using Minix. I'm doing a free operating system, just a hobby. Won't be a big professional like Gnu for 386, 486 AT clones. This has been brewing since April and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback

on these, uh, I'd like any feedback on things people like slash dislike in Minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat. Same physical layout of the file system due to practical reasons among other things. And this email was sent by Linus Benedict Torvalds on, uh,

August 25th, 30 years ago. Wow. This is the first email he sent about starting up the Linux project project cool oh that's an important day it's not the other the date that the project first started i believe that was october 10th is when the first version came out or october 11th but it's still a very important day for Linux in the tech world. That's for sure. Sure, yeah. And I don't really know where I was going to go with that topic, to be honest.

I know you've done occasional videos talking about the... You know what? Here we go. I'm like a home Linux user. And that's sort of like what I focus my channel around. You sort of focus more on, I guess I should have probably introduced, like, what you do on your channel. You focus on, like, doing stuff in, like, the tech industry and, like, how you can upskill yourself with that

and, like, what sort of stuff you would probably need to know if you want to actually, like, get anywhere in that industry. So if you were going to give someone like one reason because like people say oh learning linux is important for like doing stuff in the tech world but obviously not every position out there is going to have like linux as being something important but if you were to say like one career path where you would you think that like linux is a fundamental skill to have what do you think that would be well i can think of quite a few paths where linux is a fundamental skill and to be honest i think that will become even more important in the future so i've covered

that on my channel as well um i think because i do a lot of DevOps topics on my channel, basically talking about sysadmin or operations integration with development processes. And I think those kind of paths, Linux is just a very fundamental skill, as well as in cybersecurity. So for those of you who don't know, I'm working for a cybersecurity company five years now and um that's where i started to work with linux more professionally because i knew about linux before but i wasn't really using it um because uh before i was working in cyber security i was working as an i.t support technician i would call um And I worked a lot with desktop support, like on Windows, setting up Windows servers and all this stuff. And once I moved into cybersecurity,

because I needed to support firewall systems and those kinds of products, they were based on a Linux operating system. So the product that I'm mainly working with in my company is based on Linux. And when you need to troubleshoot those systems, you need to just know the basic tools. First things that I learned is how the system works and how to analyze log files, how to use tools like grab, set, and org, and those kind of things to just go through log files and filter for specific events or whatever. And of course, also some of the underlying concepts like system services or IP tables and all this stuff. And I think, yeah, it doesn't really matter if you are a cybersecurity guy or DevOps guy or even a sysadmin, Linux is really important.

And also for cloud administration, obviously, because a lot of the stuff in the cloud is powered by Linux, right? I think like I did it once in a video when I researched that like over 90% of the global organizations are using Linux for cloud and service and this kind of stuff. And that's, yeah, I always try to emphasize that a bit on my channel because people might not know this because I always hear people talking about the Linux market share and those things like, hey, we have like a 2% or 3% market share. Oh, it increased. It was like a big thing with like some of the Linux YouTubers who were like, oh, Linux has hit 1% in the Steam hardware survey.

I was supposed to say that. Oh, we got 1% more. Ah, Linux is crushing it and whatever. I don't know. But most people, especially beginners in IT, they probably don't realize that Linux is already a big thing. Or in servers, it always was a big thing for decades, right? And when you ever administrated a Windows server or tried to set up a web server on Windows,

you're thinking, oh man, this is so much easier on Linux. And that's why companies are, of course, using that. easier on Linux and that's why companies are of course using that and therefore I think Linux is one of these skills that I think is fundamentally important for many different career paths and I always try to identify those things and cover them on my channel because I believe that will help the most people when I just talk about topics like this. Well, even in cases like companies such as Microsoft, there was a lot of Linux articles coming out when Microsoft released CBL Marina over on GitHub.

And people were like, oh my God, Microsoft is using a Linux distribution. Like, yeah. What do you expect? Do you think they're going to host all of their stuff on Windows servers? Even they know that Windows servers are not going to be useful for everything. Yeah, they use Linux a lot, obviously.

I mean, probably that even got a huge increase once they started to work on their cloud infrastructure with Microsoft Azure. A lot of this stuff is powered on Linux servers there. They make no secret about this, right? And obviously, they also need to use these tools, and they need to work on a daily base with these tools. And I think that was probably one of the decisions why they brought up WSL and those kind of tools, because they just realized, okay, Linux is a thing.

We need to use Linux to power our systems and why not just invest into that field and use the Linux tools for our stuff as well. And I think this is actually a good idea. I really love WSL. I covered that on my channel as well and showed that in a video how I did my Windows development setup with WSL and so on. And I really just like to use Linux tools. I still use a lot of Linux tools on a daily base when I work,

such as just some simple tools like TCP dump or for reading log files, or I just use the terminal tools like org and set and grab and those kind of things i'm just used to it and powershell was always a bit weird to me that's something i probably would need to get into but i never used it i was always used to the linux way of doing things in the terminal oh hey if hey, if you really get into PowerShell, you can run it on Linux if you really want to. Yeah, I know. I know. And, yeah, I probably should.

But I don't have a real use case in my home lab for this stuff right now. I probably will when I try out new things, but currently I'm totally fine with WSL, the Linux terminal, so that does everything I need. Well, that was another thing where I was really confused why people were surprised about CBL Marina because they'd already were using it in WSL. So the way that GUI apps work under WSL2

is they have your user distro. So if you install like, I don't know, Ubuntu, Debian, whatever you have is like the distro you picked. then they'll run cbl marina alongside of that to run xorg and wayland and that's how they'll actually uh get the apps to spawn their their actual windows so they were already using that publicly but everyone just forgot about that um but speaking of wsl2 wso and wso2 i guess, where do you actually, like, if we're just theory crafting, like, what do you see as the, where do you see WSL going in the future?

And what sort of important do you see it actually having in these, like, various IT fields? Obviously, it's not going to affect something that is purely Linux-based. Like, if you're doing nothing but like Linux server administration, I don't see any reason why you would migrate over to WSL. But if it's something where you were maybe doing some of your work on Windows and some of your work on Linux, how do you see that actually changing that field? Well, I can just talk about how I use it and use that as an example.

And I think most people would actually use it the same, right? So what I do or what I recently did a lot was working with Docker and Linux workloads. And I played around with setting up my own Docker images and develop some applications. I have written my own Discord bot in Python, and I deployed this in a Docker container. And when you do development work, you need to test this a lot. And you can actually set up your development setup with WSL very easily, because it is very well integrated with all these services like Docker. And I recently started to look at Kubernetes as well because you can easily just set up a Kubernetes cluster or just like a

development cluster with just one simple click in the Docker desktop app and then it's powered by WSL everything works and you can naively work on that system and develop your applications the same way like you would deploy them on a cloud infrastructure. And this is where I think the best use case or the most powerful use case is what people will do. Because when you want to develop an app, or maybe you are just testing some deployment scripts, like when in the DevOps world, you probably work a lot with Ansible or those kind of automation tools you can easily test that on your own workstation before you deploy this in

production and the process is nearly the same before that you would need to emulate that somehow right we had Cygwin and those kind of things but they were not like a native linux environment and then you always have that these problems of you have some gaps or some things that don't work quite as in the cloud or the real environment and now you can natively work on your workstation and develop like you would do that on the real production system and i think this is a huge benefit this makes things a lot easier um I don't you said a lot there yeah probably

we can dive deeper into that stuff um I think that answered exactly what I was asking yeah um I don't know how to segue from that. Um, I,

you know, we'll just, we'll just hard segue. It doesn't even matter. Uh, both of us have sort of like really changed the, uh, the way we sort of structure our videos since the last time,

uh, the last time we talked. So I was just looking at, yeah, we're going to go straight into straight into the the youtube stuff uh and probably talk about it for the rest of the episode um so the last time you're on was about five months ago i'll send you a link to just so you can remember what uh your your scene looked like wow mine looked really bad um uh let's see where'd my discord window i have the video

window five months ago i'm just thinking about oh yeah i remember this yeah i changed a lot the background and added the audio um what is it called the audio panels or whatever yeah yeah i think the way that you've got it framed now is actually way way better and actually kind of the reason i i changed the way that my camera is angled is because uh because i i feel like every time i look at one of your videos i realize that what i'm doing is seriously lacking oh man uh thanks but uh to be honest i i still don't know what I'm doing. I'm still experimenting a lot. I know that feeling.

And it will probably change in the future as well. So it's like, I don't know. But I always had this idea of creating this look for my videos because I just saw that another channel was inspired, obviously, by some of the other creators. But I also wanted to come up with my own look and style. And, you know, I also changed a lot of my channel, the way it looks. I changed the channel banner, I think, like 10 times since I started.

I did notice you have another new one. People are making fun of it already. It's kind of like, hey, how long is this channel banner going to be? I don't know. But I honestly feel that something has changed since I changed the overall look and feel

because I now have a much clearer vision or idea of what my channel should look like and which topics I should cover. And I can talk a little bit about this because this is where I started. I started to think about, so, hey, what topics do I want to cover on my channel? I always knew, okay, this should be focused for IT tech enthusiasts and professionals. I didn't want to cover like, hey, there is a new Linux distro, let's take a look at something like this. This is nothing that interests me. But showing people how I work on my system with WSL or with Windows and Linux, I really don't care what people are using. I always say focus on the concepts and not on the

tools. And this is what I wanted to do and show on my channel. But I didn't really know which topics I should cover. Should I cover Python? This is something I'm really used to. Or should I cover Linux? Should I cover cloud technologies? Whatever. There's so much stuff you can do.

And I also have the cybersecurity background. Should I cover cybersecurity videos or whatever? I don't know. And this is why I played a lot around with different topics. And I always had this problem thinking of, hey, I should really find something to focus on. Because if you do some Python videos, then you do some security videos,

then you do some Linux videos, they don't really work well together, I think, right? Because development guys... I think it depends on how you approach it. I think if you're trying to be like a general tutorial channel, it doesn't... I think that does definitely apply. But if it's more like, hey, here's this thing I'm experimenting with, sort of like not the topic itself is the focus.

It's more like the creator and what they are learning is the focus. I think in that case, it certainly can work. But with what you're trying to get at, yeah, I fully agree that wouldn't really work. Yeah, and this is something I wanted to change. I wanted to find something like a clear path where I want to go and better understand which topics I want to cover on my channel. And I really came up with those three ideas that are currently added to the channel banner as kind of the topics that I do on my channel. The first one is home server projects, because this is what I just love to do. I love to set up test environments, home labs stuff and servers. Obviously I'm a beginner

in that space so there are much more, I would say, experienced creators out there who do amazing stuff. But I thought, well, this is not like a tutorial that I want to show people. This is just like a documentation of what I do. And I can do whatever I want in this field, right? Even if it's not setting up the most powerful rack server or the Raspberry Pi cluster or whatever, that will get a lot of clicks here. But just to document my process of setting up a home lab and see the process from where I started

to where I am within the next years, I don't know. But I have so many ideas what I want to do with this home lab and thought this should be a main topic on my channel because I also see that people are liking this kind of content. And why not just make this a main part and then I can do whatever I want in this home lab project. I can cover Firebolt, I can cover Linux distros, I can cover NAS servers or network technologies. It doesn't really matter as long as it is a home server project. And the next topic is obviously tutorials, because this is what I make. I like to create tutorials about things that I've researched and

learned. And I just want to teach people what I've learned, and the way how I learned or experienced it, because I just don't like to go through a few hour long training course or read a documentation. I know exactly, yeah. I just go and try it out myself and walk my way through that. And this is the way how I like to teach people this as well.

And the third topic that I also want to cover is IT career tips. So this is something that I just love to do. I just want. I had a hard time figuring out how I could do this. And it also probably takes a little bit more time until I'm a bigger channel with a more or with a higher reputation to give someone real advices in that space. But I still think like I have something to say or my personal experience going from I mean we talked about this in previous um uh podcasts where I just started from working

in a call center having nothing in the IT and then moved my way into that IT field and now working in a cyber security company and I'm pretty happy with that. And why not just share this to people as well, my experience or tips and tricks that I've learned over the last 10 years of being in IT. And I just like to do that because this is, when I can give someone real advices or a share experience, this is where I can really help people change something in their career or in their life. is something that i really want and yeah from time to time i will create some

videos about productivity or um about certifications and those kind of things yeah yeah i think that what you've done with the channel now actually like is working really well i occasionally like pop in every you know couple of months and i realize geez you've changed everything again um but yeah no i i think for you it's a it's a good thing because it gives you a lot of room to sort of experiment with how you want to sort of approach your content and you've gotten to a point like really quickly where i think i think what you're producing actually is like fairly fairly high quality much quicker than i got to the point where i was like happy with the uh happy with what i was actually making it took me i would say up until maybe i maybe a year ago is probably when i would feel remotely happy with anything that I've actually put up. Like looking back on it now, but I think trying out all of the stuff that you've done, trying out

like new thumbnail styles and presentation styles and all of that stuff that you've been doing, I think has really helped you actually like sort of work out exactly what you want to do like really, really quickly. And can see like like how quickly your channel's been growing that is actually it seems to be working fairly well you seem to have managed to carve yourself out a niche that i guess people want to see yeah thanks yeah i hope so but i um the numbers tell me that i do at least something right even if i don't quite understand it because i still feel like a complete beginner and just like you said if if you would look back um where i started i mean i even can't watch these videos tutorials but since some people do right um and that's why

or where i focused on since the beginning of my channel, I focused on evergreen content. I didn't really realize that because I was just trying out what I thought would make sense. And now I understand YouTube a little bit better. I understand, okay, evergreen content is going to work and that is really helping a lot with channel growth. But it's like, hey, I still feel like a complete beginner. Before YouTube, I had no idea how social media works. I didn't have a Twitter account or Instagram.

I never used that really. Yeah, I was on Facebook, but I never used Facebook. I only use Facebook to communicate with my parents. That is the only reason I'm ever going. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I really dived uh deeper into the social media world because of youtube and i still feel like a complete beginner and i think

people like um like me or people who don't know how this uh industry and how that whole stuff works uh we need some time to just figure it out. And it really depends on how much time do you have and how quickly you can reflect on your own work and try out new things and identify, hey, these are the things that work, these are the things that don't work, and I just need to cut them off. Depending on that, I think you're getting better and better,

and you just need some time, right? I've also seen some other channels doing exceptionally well with some of their first videos because they had some kind of background experience. They probably worked for clients in the YouTube or social media space and they know exactly what they do. Of course, those channels grow much faster because we need to go through that trial and error and it takes some time until you see if a video works or not I have for example one video that brought me into or just made me thought about hey maybe I should focus more on IT career tips videos because this is one video that is called IT career path the best for beginners and this is

really I would say like a video one of the earlier videos I made but it recently got some traction after a few months right surprisingly I don't know it didn't blow up but it goes to consistent growth and it's consistently watched by people and then i thought okay so this is content that i can make and still one year later this is still relevant and people can still watch it that um makes a lot of sense and that is where i try to focus making content on or the type of videos that i i try to make yeah i totally know the feeling about feeling like you're still a complete beginner with it, because every time I feel like I have some semblance of an understanding of, like,

why some video did well, I upload a video that I think is supposed to do well, and then worst performing video of the period. Like, 10 out of 10. Yeah. Like, why? What? How? Why? worst performing video of the period like 10 out of 10 like why what how that I don't think I will ever come to a point

where I totally understand it the people who do understand like the massive channels people like MrBeast who can upload a viral video every single video he uploads like I don't understand like how the algorithm works that well but i i would certainly like to get some of that some of that knowledge into my brain that would be nice just just a little a little touch of it well i can recommend two videos i i probably

will um after this podcast search the links and send it to you because there were some videos where, I don't even know what this channel is, but it's a fairly big channel. Very Tazium is this channel. Oh, yeah, okay. Don't know if you watched some of his videos, but in one video he talks

with MrBeast about this topic. This is very, very interesting. And I watched this video and another one there was also recommended by live overflow on on twitter and i talked to him about this for a while and he said oh yeah that's um that's a really interesting video and um this covers like um the two types of click, the type 1 and type 2 clickbait. And talking a lot about viral videos and why some videos work and some videos don't work. And one thing that was really the main outcome for me was like the title and the thumbnail, how important they are.

And I know like, like hey when you start on youtube everyone is saying this right yeah this is no secret yeah once you just type in how to grow a youtube channel the first video or second you watch everyone is saying like hey titles and thumbnails are important and you think like okay so maybe i need to produce a nice thumbnail and title but it is it is something that is easy to understand, but hard to master, I would say. I now have a much deeper understanding of that topic like one year ago.

Because one year ago, I just wanted to make a thumbnail that looks like other thumbnails on YouTube, put a face on there, a nice text, and maybe show something in the background. I don't know. But with that last video, it really or one tip that I think is really important is that when you want to make a thumbnail and title, you need to make something that appeals to people but also

which delivers or the video needs to deliver on that impression that people got from the thumbnail. Because you can make a video, a high quality video that is awesome. But if you don't set the right expectation with your title and thumbnail, people are not going to watch it. And this is something I didn't realize. I just thought, okay, I make a great tutorial about something. And then I will pick a title that will work good in SEO and I just focused on that and I think this is not really good because most of the SEO titles are really not fun or exciting to read yeah there are just some keywords in there but that doesn't really surprise people or set up an expectation or appeal is appealing to people. So now I'm trying to work on titles and thumbnails

that will set the right expectation and then deliver on that video. And that is quite hard to master, I would say. Yeah, it sounds easy. Certainly. Yeah, exactly. It sounds easy, but it's a thought process. And the next tip is, I can just throw that out

because people are talking about this in other videos as well um you can always change your titles and thumbnails and this is something i didn't realize mr beast talked about this in this video where he said like he's for every video he's producing three different thumbnails and he posts the video and after a few days he knows this video is going well or this video is not going well and if it's not going well he just changes the thumbnails around and see what people are reacting to and i didn't realize you can change the thumbnails i mean you can but i always was afraid of maybe that's hurting the algorithm or it does something it does damage the the I don't know but you can do that and

I just tried this with one video and it seemed to work so it's like when you change the thumbnail it's not going to blow up or it's not going to give more impressions but I think like YouTube is trying to reevalevaluate or re-assess how the thumbnail or the title will work. And then you can actually get probably a good video that doesn't really work well because of a bad title and a bad thumbnail to work better just by changing that. And that's what I'm currently trying to work on and go through some of my old videos which i think are actually good but don't have much views and maybe i just play around and change a little bit the things and and see if it works that was really helpful that was quite interesting i didn't know that um some big all the biggest bigger youtuber doing this yeah i i see uh occasionally like the

comment section like linus tech tips someone some of them are like, oh, why'd you guys change the title, or why'd you guys change the thumbnail, but I've only recently started doing the same thing myself. I haven't been changing the thumbnails, but occasionally I'll be changing the titles a bit. Yeah. So I did a video

about the Apple Store and the GPL license, and that video didn't end up doing that well. So I started trying around different titles and stuff and just seeing if anything was really going to change with that one. I guess that topic just wasn't really that interesting of a topic in the first place to my audience, but I at least wanted to try it

out to see if something something would happen at least i i didn't know if anything would but it's worth a shot if nothing else yeah exactly i mean it probably is not too much work to change the thumbnail and the title um making a new video would probably be more work i would would say. So it's just worth a try. Even if it doesn't work, you haven't really lost something, right? Maybe a bit, one or two hours of work, I don't know. But if it's going to work, it will definitely help the channel grow. So why not? Yeah, pretty much.

You were talking about audio before we started. So you were talking about the mic you wanted to upgrade to XL. So what are you using right now? So I'm right now using the Elgato Wave 1, which is a very good microphone with a very good software. And, you know, I think you're also watching Harris Heller a lot, right? Because you're using stuff. Yeah, I also do because he's doing great content.

And yeah, it's a great resource to find out more about audio and this kind of stuff. And he always talked about XLR microphones and how good they are. And I always thought, I don't know, maybe these guys just want to make money. I don't know. You can go with a microphone as well. And then he made one video about the Elgato Wave. And then I realized, okay, so this is the microphone I want to get. This is awesome.

But the problem I have with this microphone, and I didn't realize that because I didn't know how it works, is that the condenser mics or the usual mics, you need to in front of your face yeah as close as you can otherwise the sound quality is not good and i found an angle with microphone over here where it it is not in the screen or you can just yeah yeah i was gonna ask about that bottom of it i was gonna ask about your mic because last time you had it in the frame um yeah because the audio quality is much better but i i didn't want this because i wanted to create this look of not having a microphone right right um i just don't like it it is i don't know it's it's a personal thing but i wanted to create this look and i always see that

on bigger channels as well these guys don't have a microphone and i just wanted to figure out why how they are doing it because i'm playing around with this microphone and I couldn't really get it to work and now I found an angle where it's some sort of work but it's still a compromise between the audio quality and the look you want to create. The audio quality is not so good as it could be. I was playing around a lot with filters and compressor and gain whatever to make this kind of work like it does now. But the audio quality could be better with this microphone. But for the look I want to create, it's the wrong microphone.

I need a shotgun mic. And I didn't know this because I didn't know anything about audio, right? This is probably the mistake you make when you when you're starting out and you just try and you buy some things and then you realize uh this doesn't work the way that i wanted yeah i started now i did some so i yeah oh yeah it's not a bad mic but it was good when it came out there's much better options in the price range right now like the elgato wave yeah and i just um i just didn't want to make the investment into an xlr interface and microphone but now i think my channel has reached a point where i should invest um because

i can yeah yeah from the ad revenue is enough to invest in an XLR mic, and that's fine because I always like to invest nearly 100% of all the revenue that comes into my channel or comes out of the channel, goes directly into the channel again just to buy some new stuff, gear, or whatever helps me to create better content. And the XLR just makes sense right now.

So I just ordered the Go XLR Mini just to, because I think that's a good start. And I ordered a shotgun mic, the Rode NTG4 Plus. And let's see if that works. I don't know, but I hope. But when you just started with an XLR interface, you can always just change the microphone yeah you can always upgrade to a better one later and this is an advantage you got over the USB mics

and yeah I think that just kind of makes sense and I also ordered a new camera lens because I think that camera lens I have right now it's working yeah yeah but it's a very cheap lens and it doesn't really work so well in low light situation like i need so i i upgrade um or i just ordered the sigma lens i think that's a fairly uh well-known lens everybody's recommending sigma 1.4 that everyone yeah yeah okay everyone is using that but yeah it yeah, it just makes sense, right? I did some research. Do you have some alternatives? And no.

In that price range, you really don't have any alternatives. So I think that just makes sense. And I hope that will even make the image and the audio quality a little bit better. Yeah, I've been using my AKG P120 for quite a while now, and I've only really just gotten to the point where I understand what I'm doing somewhat with audio, because I've shown it before. I don't know if I can point it at it.

Can we see it? Can't see it. Nope, can't see it. You can kind of see it there's a ah yeah the interface right yeah there we go audio interface um nice so i've got a lot of a lot of room where i can like play around with stuff um and i don't know what i'm doing so i like i've got a built in EQ, built in compressor, um, built in effects mixer and stuff. And I've been trying to like work out quite kind of for a while, like where I want to have the mic placed, um, where I can get sort of like the, the best audio quality.

I don't really, like, I'm not going for that look where you don't have a mic in the frame. So I think I have, I have more room with like where I'm not going for that look where you don't have a mic in the frame. So I think I have more room with, like, where I can place the mic, but trying to get in a position where it's close enough to me while still not, you know, blocking anything, like, that I'm trying to work with. So, like, not getting in the way of my keyboard, not getting in the way of my screen, things like that. Then also, I wanted to change around my lighting.

So I want to have a... I want to move one of my lights to more... A bit more in front of me than where it is right now. And where the mic was before, if I put the light there, there would have been like a really bad shadow on my face. So I've been trying to work that out. Sorry?

Yeah, those problems that... It's sometimes really hard to figure out but i've i've been wanting to replace this mic but i didn't want to replace until i dealt with like the rest of those problems like i i keep i keep looking at the sigma 1.4 for my camera and i keep looking at the shore sm7b and like i want to to buy it, but they're very expensive. Oh yeah. Like I, I really want a Shure SM7B and I can afford one, uh, and I should buy one. But if I'm, my, my idea is if I'm not already getting the most out of the gear that I currently

have, it doesn't really make any sense to buy something better. I would say like if i'm yeah if i'm if i'm still not like eqing and stuff correctly with this mic there's no point going up for something that is more expensive if i'm not going to be using it to its full potential absolutely yeah i agree with that if you don't know how to use it, this was also part of the reason why I didn't go with an XLR, because I just didn't want to learn it. I just thought a USB mic might be just easier for me. When you are at this point and you realize, hey, I've just used everything or just tried out everything I can with the current gear and it's not working out. I just need that.

It makes sense to buy it. But as you said, if you still have room for improvement with your current gear, you can just try it or spend more time to figure out how things work because it can be really complicated. It's like people don't see that. People just see the end result, but they don't see that, people just see the end result, but they don't see what

pain you've gone through to achieve that look or to get that on you working. To be fair with the GoXLR though, it's not like that's that complicated to work with. You have a gain slider. I hope. Yeah, okay, that's great. Yeah, I hope that will work, but I think I can figure it out now. You saw this, I've got like, there's like, I don't know, like 20 knobs on this. You're going to work out which knobs actually

if you control the mic you've got plugged in. Yeah, I think I can work this out. Yeah, I wanted to get a GoXLR. That was going to be my option if I didn't get a mixer board. The problem, though, is there's no drivers for it on Linux. And when... This is the problem with GoXLR. There's plenty of audio interfaces that work great.

The GoXLR is a electrical brick if it doesn't have drivers. It doesn't do anything. Okay, so that does make sense. That's why I still use Windows in this case, right? It's just like sometimes it's a bit easier for those kind of things

that are probably a bit unconventional. I don't know. Well, ultimately what I could do is I could build a Windows streaming PC if I really wanted to. That would deal with all of these problems. But if I can get it to work with my current setup, I want it to work with my current setup.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that just makes more sense. I mean, do you really want a second PC just for that Go XLR? I don't know. And then you need to deal with Windows. Well, I have a Windows. I don't know. I have a Windows install on my 128 gig SSD that I open i open up once a week uh yeah it has got windows updates

must be painful on this one yeah yeah they are a little bit but it's it's fine i can deal with it there's like there's one game that i want to play on windows and that's the only reason i ever boot it up so my um i have all of the software that I run like on that entire system in my start bar it's my internet my web browser and the game that's it that's everything

yeah if that's all you need I mean that's perfect but um I think the idea of a shotgun mic actually would be really cool I've considered like trying one out at some point. I think it would definitely produce an interesting look, that's for sure. If you want to have a really clean look that's just you and your background, that's the easiest way to do it.

Besides going, I guess, with a lavalier mic. But then you get the problems with lavaliers where if you're moving a bit they start rattling against your clothes and yeah you can get them to work i tried to laugh mike once and i couldn't figure out how it works and it just i just sent this back i just didn't want to deal with it uh But a shotgun mic I think just makes more sense for my setup. It's just the thing that I need. I'm still wondering why people don't use shotgun mics for live streaming. There must be something to it that doesn't seem to work quite well with live streaming but I don't know. I will see once I got it. Maybe because of the background

noise of the keyboard or something like this. i think that probably you will still hear that with a shotgun mic i guess i guess it depends on the sort of content you're doing like if you're doing like what you normally do where it's more just chatting with the audience i think it would work um yeah i think it would work. Yeah. I think it would be... Yeah, I think if it was, like, more gaming content, you might have sort of an unwatchable stream because of the background noise. Yeah, probably that's a problem why no one is using that. But I also think, like, when I'm recording tutorials, you would hear the typing of my keyboard.

But to be honest, I kind of like that. When I create tutorials and I'm recording tutorials you would hear the typing of my keyboard but to be honest I kind of like that when I create tutorials and I'm typing something to just show people this command it just makes sense to hear the typing so what are you using for your keyboard um I'm currently using logitech I think what is that 413 okay something like uh because if you had like you know cherry blues or like browns or something maybe that would be uh ah yeah no i i wanted to get the quiet ones so i ordered this one with the quiet switches because i just i just don't like this uh this sound it's this personal preference you still hear that sound when I'm recording tutorials. But as I said, I kind of like this. And I don't know if it really is distracting.

I think it sometimes even helps a little bit more when you hear someone typing a command that you just want to follow. Then it also makes sense to hear the typing because then you know there's something going on. So in this case case for my tutorials i think it doesn't really um is a is is a disadvantage in this case but obviously when you're doing live streaming and you want to play games then yeah you probably don't want this i understand but i i don't do this i don't play games in my live stream. I think if you wanted to deal with the sound anyway,

it wouldn't be that loud, assuming you don't have, like, blues or something. So you could deal with it with noise suppression and noise gating if you really wanted to get rid of the sound. Yeah, that works. I also have noise suppression on the Elgato Wave. I set it up in OBS. But the problem is it works pretty well when you don't speak.

But when you're speaking and typing, then it's not going to work. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you can hear it right now. It just started raining here. But it's getting pretty loud outside. So if anyone hears that, that's why. Oh, okay. It's not my cable half plugged in or something that would be a much worse noise oh yeah um that's one concern with xlar make sure you are very careful with the cables because ah okay yeah that's good to know

if you are don't have it pushed all the way in, violent screeching, which is not a good sound, but usually if you know what you're doing and you actually push the cable and you'll be fine. I've just learned my mistake once from doing that. Oh, man. Audio is so complicated. Oh, absolutely. Because I just want this to work. I don't want to play with that.

It just needs to work. One of the problems with audio is it's hard to really tell in some cases if there actually is an issue. I've got these, just for the sake of testing out audio, I've got a pair of SR850s here. They're fairly cheap open backs, but they are studio headphones and do the

job well enough. At least when it comes to, you know, how your camera looks, you can sort of judge whether that looks good based on like how you look at it. But sometimes with some of the more subtle audio issues, you can't really tell unless you're actually using relatively decent audio gear anyway. And that's right. In some cases, then you have to decide, is it worth fixing that little issue if only the people with like high end studio gear can also hear it? Yeah, that's probably right. I mean, in our space, it's. yeah that's probably right i mean in our space it's let's be honest i think camera gear and this kind of stuff is somehow important but i think in our space in the tech space i think

it's it's not that couldn't be a primary focus i would say right i mean the content still is is good i i still see people watching tutorials with really terrible audio just because they want to know a technical topic. People are going through that. So I think we have a niche where we still have this. We don't need to have that highest gear. I still, people are still up to that. Of course, everybody likes if the video has a good audio and a good video quality for sure. But I still don't think that it will make a huge difference if I got a new camera lens. People are not going to notice that probably. And even when they do, they still want to watch the tutorial.

They still want to know the technical topics and don't really care if my face looks a little bit better or not. I think, like, that is something you can play around, but you really need to think about, hey, does it really make sense to invest these, like, a few hours into making this perfect instead of just recording a new video that... I don't know. You always need to

make that or find that balance, right? Well, I know there are some oh, there's one fairly big Linux channel specifically oh, I guess X Linux channel at this point who records his videos with a C920 and a Blue Yeti. He has 130,000

subs. He can afford an upgrade but it works. Yeah, well, there's something I don't understand. Why... Okay, if you got a channel that is so big, why don't you just do that upgrade? That is something I can't understand. I mean,

at some point, it just makes sense. Well, I think some people get themselves stuck in this cycle of buying upgrades for the sake of buying upgrades but i i like you can there is this i guess it's the sky is the limit with like how much you want to spend on your channel but i i i yeah i the videos are perfectly fine like it's not like they're bad. That's the thing. The content itself is good.

It's just that I think it could be better if it wasn't... Yeah, even just, like, honestly, even just, like, recording the video with your phone would look better, to be honest. Like, I believe it is possible, but, like, the C920, like, it's a webcam. It's not... It doesn't look good. No.

This webcam is horrible. And I know because I use that for my meetings. I have it in the same setup and it just looks bad. But for business meetings, that's fine, right? Yeah, when I was in my last year of uni, I did have my, actually, yeah, I did have my camera. So I was the one guy in the Zoom call that had a really good camera. Yeah, that is...

Well, it's nice, right? But yeah, back to the gear and the investment. I think that... I still have the opinion that gear matters but it shouldn't be the the primary focus i think that um but it's like with everything i think everything needs to make sense right um you need to have everything on the same kind of level i would say right this is my opinion right so if you're making bad content and you have a good camera and good microphone doesn't make sense to yeah to upgrade the camera microphone you need to learn

to make better content but if your content is good and you see it's working and you could upgrade your camera microphone then it would make sense to just raise everything to the same level of quality right you always i think you always should focus on things that don't work and try to improve them i'm gonna i'm gonna play devil's advocate for just because it'd be funny uh if you're if you're if you're if you're making like really bad minecraft videos please go buy a ten thousand dollar red camera i think that would be funny yeah Yeah, absolutely. Don't actually do that, please. That's a car. Like, avoid that.

But it would be funny. If you can somehow get your hands on a red camera, do it. Anyway. Yeah, but this is, I would say, this is the thing with audio and gear and this kind of stuff some people just like to buy new things that i don't like to buy new things because it's i don't like to spend money yeah yeah only i only do it if it makes sense and if i can afford it and um i i made And I made myself this promise that I would never invest my, or just, I invested some of my private money

once I started the channel, just to buy a very cheap microphone and buy an editing software to record my phone's camera. But this is how I started. And I made myself this promise, I would not invest any more money into this channel until it makes money right and this is how I deal with that and and it works pretty well so I have some other

things in mind that I could buy just maybe something that would make more sense than buying a better camera because my camera is good it's not 4k but I don't need 4k so it's fine for now right now uh i have this uh um this is sony uh what is alpha 5100 yeah okay this one here yeah and that's pretty good it's it's a beginner um the camera and i got a very cheap lens and i think the lens upgrade would make the most sense right now instead of upgrading the camera but then i'm fine for i don't know maybe for the next two years until the channel i don't know yeah but um then i probably would invest into a graphics tablet um i think you've got a drawing tablet as well right i do um so one of the videos, yeah. I want to get one of them. It's $50. I think you can afford the investment.

Yeah, I want to get one with a screen. Ah, yes, okay. Because then I could use this as an overlay, I think, to record it for my tutorials. Because I like to draw things in tutorials, this is something that I recently discovered. Because sometimes you just need to explain architecture. For example, in my last video about Kubernetes, I wanted to explain the Kubernetes architecture, which is kind of hard if you can't visualize it somehow, right? So you need some kind of visualizing.

And then I thought, maybe i can just show a diagram and um i i searched for a software where i can draw something or create a um a sheet and this is so horrible this is so much work and i thought well if i would have a small graphic tablet just to draw something right this is the only thing you need to explain something. That would make so much more sense and I could use this in so many other tutorials when I, for example, explain something about network topologies or maybe just... I did that once when I explained DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS, those kind of things. Just draw the packets and the protocol stacks and so on. Yeah, yeah.

those kind of things just draw the packets and the protocol stacks and so on yeah yeah now that that just makes sense so upgrading to something like this will make the quality of the videos much better i would say so this would be a great investment into the channel i think that would be something that is a unlike upgrading like you could go and get like you know a two thousand dollar camera three thousand dollar camera i don't think many people are going to really notice that change but something that actually does change the way you're handling the content that i think is a if if there's anything you want to buy early i think that makes considerably more sense um absolutely i don't have anything on my radar that i'm looking at like that like Like I'm, I've got some plans to use the tablet,

but I didn't buy the tablet for the channel. I bought this for my own personal use and I, I can recoup some of the costs with the channel. Um, but my, like the only upgrades I I'm looking at right now are those, the lens and the microphone. Once I've got those,

I can't see anything else right now that I want to buy. Um, yeah, I probably could work some stuff out, but I just like, my problem is room. Like there's things I would love to do, but I don't have space to do the things I would want to do.

Hmm. Yeah, I get that. I have the same problem. It probably doesn't look like, but just because I've created this space behind me exactly how I want it to look, but don't look at the rest of the

room. Also, I would love to get a standing desk, but that doesn't work. So I don't have the space for a standing desk because I'm working in the attic. The roof is blocking that, so I can't get a standing desk i can't raise it higher so that's a problem and but that's something you can't change yeah you need to work around this

somehow but yeah i i also don't have anything else that i want to get well probably the upgrade to 4k might work at some point but let's be honest This is in the range where people probably don't notice so much right my camera does support 4k The problem with it is it does it crops in on the video as well So okay, if I set it to 4k the video would look something like this I can't move any camera any further back. Why is that? It's a cheap mirrorless camera. That's why.

Ah, okay. It's a Canon M200. So on the same price range as your A5100. Ah, okay. Ah, okay. So maybe these cameras are not made for 4K. I don't know. Well, I could make it work if I move the camera further away.

That's the only way I could do it. Yeah, okay. But I just... I don't have any way I could do that. That's my issue with that. If I wanted to go 4K, I would have to get a newer camera or a higher-end camera. Yeah, the problem I have when I want to go with 4K,

I probably want at some point, but then I need to get, for recording in OBS, I think I need to get 4K monitors as well. Yeah. Because otherwise, and then I need to upgrade my graphics card because... Good luck doing that right now. Oh, yeah, that's horrible. But, yeah, I need to upgrade it at some point hopefully i can still wait but yeah yeah when you go and you want to make that change to 4k you need

to upgrade a lot of things right your monitors your capture card maybe your pc because it's not powerful enough you need your camera space to deal with the new footage oh yeah four times and then i'm in the range i'm in the range like two to three thousand yes it's just too much right now yeah yeah for sure and i don't really need that but maybe at some point maybe i can set a goal when the channel hits 100k i don't know if it ever happens but i think if if i just continue to do what i do and it may work i don't know i don't i don't see any reason why you wouldn't yeah that's good as i was saying to you on dms i i feel like you're gonna overtake my channel very soon well i don't know um it can change any time sure it can can but if the numbers stay consistent Mathematically it would because I just when I just compare the subscriber growth

I don't know when it will happen, but it really I don't care The thing that I look when I look at the numbers really are so how many views look when I look at the numbers really are so how many views do I get from my videos and the average watch time I try to focus on those kind of things but from time to time of course I also compare my channel to others because I just I just try to find out so what other channels are doing better or where I can improve but it looks pretty well currently. And I think my last two videos did also very well. That was the Kubernetes video that I just published yesterday.

And one week before that was how to protect Linux from hackers, my server security strategy. Those two videos worked really well. And I think people were really waiting for that security video. I planned to make it like I already planned to make it I think last year or so and I really wasn't sure about this video because I'm I didn't want to tell anything wrong in this video. Especially with security topics I'm very careful what i put out there and i wasn't really sure about um the ssh topic and what i should tell in this video and what i

should not tell in this video so i really um took quite a long time to to figure out my opinions on that and how I could make this video interesting because I've seen so many other videos on Linux server security where people just throw out their best practices or what they found when googling like disabling root lock in, setting up SSH keys and setting up a firewall and those kind of things right so that's basic you can actually google that in five minutes it's actually not so difficult sometimes you hear bad advices on those forum posts and sometimes videos sometimes you hear really good and valuable ones and then i thought hey how could i make this video a little bit more interesting or could add something new to it because so many channels and

blog posts have covered this before and yeah I really don't know but people were requesting that people were always asking um me hey make a video about this and I thought yeah I don't know but um I think I figured out a good way to do it because I added some of the topics that I covered on my channel, like, for example, Docker. Right. And I figured out, like, two topics with Linux Server Security really don't care about Docker. The first one is updates because every security video is telling you to enable unintended upgrades for security patches. But that doesn't update any of the Docker packages, right? So how do you how do

you update your docker images yeah don't forget about this this is something that i included in the video or the second one is um people are always telling you hey enable the uncomplicated firewall and block any ports yeah that's fine but it's not working for darker containers by default because they are working in a different ip tables chain and this is ignored by the uncomplicated firewall. So this is something I should tell people, right? So it made quite a longer video than others probably, but I thought it would bring the most value to my core audience who's watching my darker tutorials a lot and people who are self-hosting servers, setting up darker containers, and then they follow my security best practices. And then, of course, that should include these setups as well.

So this is what I did on this video. And those videos worked pretty well. And I hope this will give the channel a little bit more boost. But I really worked on those videos so hard because they are longer than 30 minutes and this was just so much work that i just need to make some shorter videos in the next weeks because i'm otherwise i just will burn out yeah those man i i i guess it's because i do like videos almost daily but i can't even imagine doing a video that long like my longest videos are usually in the range of like 15 or 20 minutes

at most um which is already pretty long if you if you're going for daily content i would say my my general aim is around the 8 to 10 minute Mark, uh, because minerals, um, but no, I, I don't, I don't aim specifically for the minerals. It's just that most topics end up being,

being short enough that they fit in that timeframe. Yeah. You can talk about, um, everything forever, right? It still should be valuable. I could obviously stretch any video out to 20 or 30 minutes

if I really tried to do so. I just don't think there's any value in trying to do so. Actually, that's one of the things I've been working on. One of the problems I had with my early content is I felt like I expanded out out the like what I was saying way too much and didn't really didn't really get to the point that I like how I'm over saying what I'm trying to say what I'm saying I shouldn't be what I over complicate my videos there we go that's the short way to say that I don't

this is the problem that's This is how my brain works. If I let that happen, it would just like way overthink everything and like produce whatever that nonsense just was. That's why I always script my videos. So I write out everything that I say, except for those walkthrough parts where I share my screen and do stuff then I just have bullet points and then explain it but I sometimes cut out some things that are repetitive or doesn't make sense and then you still have a video that's 20 or 30 minutes long but it's

not I found out it's not really helping you if um if you try to make it longer just for sake of making it longer because then people are not watching it and the average watch time is still an important factor so you need to put in as much value as you can in a very short amount of time that's how youtube works, right? So you need to add some kind of value. My metric that I'm handling this better is the fact that gradually over time, my watch time has been slowly increasing. I'm sitting around...

I think it's around four and a half minutes right now. Yeah. I think so, which I think is fairly good. It's definitely good on my channel for sure. Yeah, it is good. I think... What is my watch time? It's gone out of here. It's 3.58 right now.

Okay, well, ignore me. 4.30. Okay, yep. Average view duration for all the videos. Recently, it's more like 4.30, but over everything, it's closer to 4. But I've got a lot of early videos that are still getting a lot of views. And a lot of those early videos weren't structured as well, where people do drop off fairly early, even though they're still getting a lot of views.

So it's sort of like bringing that number down a bit. Yeah. I think what worked on my videos is really focus on the intro or the hook part. Because this is where I try to experiment, of course. Because in the past, I also had an intro. I got rid of that intro completely. There was so much work to make, but I just got rid of it because I feel it doesn't make any sense.

And I also included a part where I teaser some of the content that I make in this video. So I just summarize in three or four sentences what I'm going to show in this video and then I make or show the parts or show some small parts just a few seconds of this video just like people can see where I explain something with a drawing chart or where they see some of the screen share when I'm typing commands or explaining something so that people get a very clear idea of what to expect from the rest of this video

in the first few seconds. This is what I really try to work on in the last videos. And I think that that pays out very well because then people have the right expectation right from the beginning. And I think that's going to help a lot. So that is what I try to work on. Really make that first part as good as you can. Yeah. Then you can talk random shit. No,

not really, but, um, yeah. Like the hook is one of those things that I've, I still don't really know what I'm, I'm doing with it, but I think that I've sort I still don't really know what I'm, I'm doing with it, but I think that

I've sort of, I think that, how, how to describe it, briefly describe, like, I, I don't know how to describe how I approach it, now that I'm trying to explain it, um, hmm, I guess, how guess how would you put it well i i used to have an intro as well like a i would do like hey i i am this person i make this nonsense here's my like video intro all that stuff that i cut ages ago um yeah me too and now i guess the way that I approach it is I try to, I try to explain, let's say I'm doing a video on, I don't know, setting up Nginx. I don't know. I will explain sort of like the problem I'm having in a way that tries to, I guess, hook into like the sort of problem that like people would normally be

having if they're approaching a video like that like here is um i i hope that what i'm saying makes any sense it probably doesn't um yeah and i can imagine uh what you're trying to say right i mean it um how how could i explain it i i try to it's depending on what you want to do if you want to tell a story um that works pretty well so i try to do that for my home server projects for example because then storytelling is important right because it's not just about a tutorial it's about telling what is your problem and what did you do to fix it and then in the next parts you're going to show the people how you exactly do it but so that people get an idea of and you can grab people's interests and so they can see oh i i want to know how this works or i

want to know how he did that actually so if you've got that i think you're pretty fine actually here's an example of something um oh one other thing i try to hook people in with is like maybe like a bit of a bit of a joke at the start so i've got a video that i want to do next week um so my state has these uh at every like business is like checking things because of covid and i've i discovered a massive security floor in the like really big security floor so um now i'm gonna make a video because it's gonna be hilarious um cool so i'm i'm gonna start this video like hey as you probably could tell i'm an Australian and Australia is no stranger to Absolute bodged up tech where back in 2016 the census claimed they suffered a DDoS attack in reality

They told everybody in the country to connect the exact same time and didn't pay for enough server load So as we can see Australia doesn't exactly know how to handle tech This is uh, This is gonna be another... That'll go into some... That'll start actually going into the main topic. So I'm trying to, I guess, hook him with maybe some funny anecdote that's related to the topic. Right now, I think that that's working out. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's a completely different approach from what I do in the hook, but it's it's it makes sense Mm-hmm, because our content is different. Yeah, of course I think your idea that will work perfect for the kind of the video that you want to make. Mm-hmm I'll let you know afterwards what the

Maybe I'll let you know afterwards what the floor is maybe that's one of these videos which doesn't work at all it's really bad like if I wanted to I could flood the database right now kind of bad oh man I could write a python script in the next 5 minutes and crush this database

well that sounds pretty terrible if you send this over i will be sending it very soon yeah um where were we we were uh talking about intros that's what we're talking about um yeah i don't think there's much else to say about that uh one thing i did want to ask about though is i see a bunch of people with that sign that you have in the background the the one the one you got lit off in the background i have no idea what those signs are called like this uh which signs the the one you got that says the digital life in the background there ah okay what are those signs

called i see a bunch of people with those signs i don't know i don't know what these signs are called how did you get one uh i just bought it from amazon i think you can uh switch out the the um the letters right right right what did you search for to find these signs i don't know i think you bought one don't remember anymore okay that, my wife showed that to me because she said, hey, that would look good in your videos. And I thought, yeah, okay, yeah, then just buy it. Because I've been... I don't have any way to put it right now, but at some point, I want to

have an actual... Things in the background. Yeah. It's the least original thing on the entire planet. Everybody has one of these signs but i still like them yeah i still think about adding more stuff in the background i added some of my lego stuff in the background i also want to add a picture yeah i just ordered a picture i want to put in the background from mr robot series so that would that would work pretty well, I would say, as a background.

I've still only seen the first season. I need to watch the rest of it. Oh man. You need to watch it. I think I told you last time. Probably did. I really need to get around to it. I really liked the first season. It was good. I've just had other things preoccupying my time, like other things I want to watch or you know doing things that are actually productive not sitting down watching making videos obviously yeah it's not like throwing out so many videos yes and still working yeah that's crazy i people will say oh it's crazy you make daily videos. Like, I don't make daily videos.

I record in bulk. I'm not a crazy person. Like, there's a reason why whenever a news topic happens, I'm, like, four days late to it. Because I'm not going to, like, record on a Sunday. That's not happening. I tried that once to catch up with some of the topics that were but you do really long videos those that's like yeah and really really i guess your videos take a lot

of a lot more research than what i'm doing and that can come down the fact that you do less videos so you can spend more time preparing them um yeah how did that experiment go um yeah i i don't really aim to make those videos long it just turns out that they need to be that long when i research a topic so i i i don't go for hey i want to make this video 30 minutes long or 20 minutes long. I just go into a topic that interests me or that I want to learn. Like Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a good example.

That's a topic that I recently started to learn because that's just a huge topic everybody is using. I explained it in the video why I think Kubernetes is really important for the IT industry. And this is a topic I thought I just need to learn. So I started to read and research about this. And I thought about, so how can I explain this to people in simple words? And I already tried to simplify it. but it turns out that you can't explain this topic in like 10 or 15 minutes I've seen videos try to do that but but then

I think you only scratched the surface and people don't really get the whole idea of it mmm or you really need to make a video like 30 minutes long to explain or to just get people started with that, I guess, right? And other videos like, I made a video once about, what is that? I don't know. Where's this video? That's how I feel about most of my videos. Did I make that video? What is it? And you have even more videos, right? Yeah, so this was one video about Windows 11 TPM. I just wanted to make a video about it. And this video, I can't make 30 minutes long, of course.

It is 10 minutes long, which is already kind of longer than it needed to be. it needed to be but i thought i i should just take some time to explain some of the features the tpm provides for windows 11 so this were like i i saw people always making videos about um the basic things like hey what is the tpm and um why it is terrible, right? So I always watch videos like this, right? But as a security guy, I wanted to find out. So there must be a bigger reason behind it, right? And there must be some features they need. And I couldn't really find a good video explaining all the different things,

so I tried to make one myself. But this is like a shorter topic right um and I also thought well I probably it took me too long to um to bring this video out because um I didn't see much fraction on this video and this is probably because my video was just one of I don't know, 40 videos that came out in the first days. And I released it like two weeks after because I really took my time to research that and really try to find out. So what are the features in TPM? They mentioned something like Azure attestation.

So what the hell is that and all this kind of stuff? Because I don't want to talk about something they don't understand. And then I thought, okay, so that probably doesn't work well for news topics, right? So I don't know, but just what I wanted to say, so I don't aim for a specific time. It just is depending, completely depending on the topic that I want to cover. I do try to aim to keep them around the 12-minute mark. Like, at the most, that's my general goal. Like, that's partially just to keep my sanity

so I don't end up recording 30-minute videos multiple times a day. But I think for a lot of topics, at least a lot of the stuff I'm doing, if I go above that point i it's sort of stretching like the interesting parts of the video like i could like with tpm you could make a half hour video just tracing out like the transistor diagram if you wanted to yeah um but with a with a video like that i think something like that probably does make sense to be around the 10 minute mark

because that's, while people do have much shorter attention spans 10 minutes is plenty of time to give you a good enough understanding of most things like it's not going to give you the most in-depth understanding for sure

but it's enough, like if you structure your video well, it's certainly enough time to get your point across yeah i i just have i i don't really know if i have any video that is shorter than eight minutes this is a magic mark for for mid-rolls but it's not like i'm i'm not focusing on these mid-rolls i just think that most topics just need their time for explanation and i i just don't make videos about those short topics that is quite funny um because i i experimented a little bit with youtube shots yeah and um have you stopped doing that now yeah because there's a very simple reason because i don't like watching shorts okay fair enough it's like and it's like hey why

should i make a video format that i don't enjoy watching myself that doesn't make any sense at all i think it was just the wrong intention to just use a feature for growth that I wouldn't enjoy watching myself. This probably was just a dumb idea because I didn't understand how to use Shorts. And I see many other channels doing this, using YouTube Shorts,

but I don't know. It doesn't feel like it really makes a huge difference, and I've never seen a channel that blow up because of shorts. Probably there are some examples, but only if they make specific kind of content. I think content that I make doesn't

really work well in shorts. It just doesn't make any sense. What I've been seeing recently is I've been seeing a lot of the more TikTok-style content, like not the dance videos they're more like hey here's here's some like 50 second uh science video uh stuff like that taking off or there's one one channel that showed up my recommended um the dude who works in the ice cream shop and he just like does 50 seconds of like making ice cream uh stuff like that and the stuff like that that like channels like that explode like massively uh there was one

i can't imagine that this is a weird one it was rating the uh rating anime characters based on how they would perform in a bodybuilding competition. I don't know why it existed, but it worked really well. Yeah. And stuff like that, I think, works really well for shorts. And the other stuff I think works is gaming clips. Like, if you're taking live stream clips, I think... Because those already were basically shorts anyway. A lot of them were under a minute long.

So it's basically just taking them out of the regular youtube algorithm and putting this i'm putting them into a separate one and from what i'm seeing like shorts are doing real like gaming shorts are doing really well uh i i only use shorts on my my gaming channel right now and that channel is sitting around 300 subs i've got multiple videos uh that were uploaded to shorts sitting above like a thousand at this point which is pretty large for that channel um interesting and i have noticed that lead to channel growth but i don't know whether that that growth translates in because i only live stream on that channel besides the shorts yeah i don't know if that growth is going to translate into live stream growth that's something i'm still experimenting with yeah i think you hit

the right point here are the two main complaints i have about youtubeorts or why I don't use them anymore. Mm-hmm. First is they don't really work well for educational content. Yeah. I would say for entertaining content, perfect. For edutainment stuff, I think it works well. Yeah. That's perfect. But, um, I could imagine making some entertaining videos in YouTube Shorts. I could imagine making some entertaining videos in YouTube Shorts. I definitely could find something. But do the views or the new people you get really translate well with the rest of your content? Because the intention why they watched your short and why they subscribed to your video was this short, this kind of content.

video was this short this this kind of content and it's really hard when i learned once in social media it's really hard to translate people to other form of content or to other form of platforms um because this was not the reason why they subscribe to you in the first place yeah the reason why they subscribe to you in the first place because they watched a piece of content they enjoyed it and they want to see more of that. So when I would make an educational YouTube short about, I could make this, for example, Docker container update images. Yeah, I could just tell

in one minute why you should always update your Docker images and how to do that. It's not a problem. But when you watch a video like this, yeah, I don't know. For educational content, it probably wouldn't work well and would those guys watch the other videos of the channel i don't know so for my channel it really doesn't make any difference at all and when i see at the when i look at the views

okay so the youtube shorts they got some views right but that doesn't help my channel in any way so the views don't we are sure it's not monetized at this stage either yeah that that's that's the next problem so it doesn't really help so much the channel um at least not my channel so then i i just got rid of that and the other thing that or then the main reason was really i tried to find out hey um what do the people do who watch youtube shorts and basically they they open youtube on their phone go to youtube shorts and i watched some of the shots just to find out what is in there and there's so much stupid garbage content i i just don't i just don't know why i should watch this. This is like when I watch TikTok or Instagram Reels. This is just, I watch that and then I think, oh man, why should I? I waste my time with that,

right? And I close this. And I think there's no point of making shots myself. This is called getting old. This is called getting old and not understanding what the kids like. Yeah, yeah yeah that's right but it's like hey if I don't like it myself why should I make this totally fair the only reason I do it with the gaming channel is because I sort of like my

that's the channel I don't really care about I was going to play some games anyway so I might as well stream them and I just sort of want to see what effect shorts actually will have. Yeah. It's interesting. If they do nothing,

Hey, they do nothing. I'm going to keep streaming, but if they do lead to some growth, like what I can say is the channel has gained a lot of subscribers since I started doing shorts. And there has been, there has been some growth when it comes to

my live stream viewers but I'm not sure if those viewers are coming from the shorts or coming from my main channel because I advertise on my main channel as well when I do a stream so it's hard to work out exactly what's going on there but I think they're worth

experimenting with if you have a gaming channel. For gaming channels, absolutely. Yeah, I would say there must be a point to it, right? Otherwise, people wouldn't use it. But I still feel like the experience watching this short-form content for me just doesn't work out on any platform. It doesn't matter if it's on Instagram or on YouTube.

By the way way i started making content on instagram as well because i just recently figured out a way that i could make instagram content that would make sense for me personally because i just don't want to throw out the same kind of content on another platform that doesn't make any sense at all because people can just watch the videos but for example i recently did a lot of diagrams or visual things, right? So this is a perfect idea for making an Instagram post. And I think that could make sense. I'm experimenting with that because I feel like I also want to be active on other platforms as well.

YouTube is still the main platform, obviously. But I absolutely love Twitter. be active on other platforms as well. YouTube is still the main platform, obviously, but I absolutely love Twitter. For example, Twitter is a great platform where I spend also a lot of time figuring out how I can create content there. And Instagram I just recently

got into because I think that is something I see a lot of developers on Instagram making these kind of content there, or they sometimes make their setup content. There's some actually good content for developers on Instagram, and I thought, well, for DevOps and sysadmin guys and those kind of things, I haven't really found so much, so maybe I'll just try it out and see how it goes.

But the Instagram reels is like i i still don't know if i would make reels reels are the what is real uh that is like youtube shorts right okay yeah and it's basically the same just like i think youtube started making shorts because uh tiktok raised and then instagram instagram probably just try to adopt any form of content that they see on other platforms it's crazy they have now basically yeah yeah but i think that is what we what we will see in all social media platforms at some point that they all will try to offer those types of content like i i see like um short form content i see long form content oh yeah yeah nice and i see live streaming content and you can see on all social media platform they have some

kind of offering that for that kind of content on instagram they have reels they also have live streams and they have longer videos with IGTV so they're basically doing everything YouTube is doing the same they now have live streaming and shorts and Twitter also has Twitter spaces and live streaming YouTube also has the temporary content as well like the the stories oh yeah the stories exactly yeah that's something that you see like, all social media platforms, they sometimes will offer the same kind of content, right? I would say. And live streaming is, yeah, live streaming is probably the next big thing

that would be interesting to take a look at, right? I don't know. You also do a lot of live streaming, right? I stream three times a week. Yeah, whoa, three times a week. Yeah. Whoa. This is three times a week. Yeah.

Yeah. I do that once a week on YouTube. And I try to experiment with Twitch and YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. But I just thought it just makes more sense to go on YouTube where my core audience is. I personally, I restream. So I'm on YouTube, Twitch, and DL at the same time.

Do you think that helps your channel? I've noticed some interesting growth happening with Twitch. Twitch is a weird platform. YouTube, made by sensible people, has an algorithm that can recommend stuff. Twitch orders by number of viewers. i don't know how anyone finds my channel people have found it somehow but because of youtube probably no i've there's been a couple of people who just found it on twitch they didn't even know i had a main channel and i was really confused yeah okay yeah that is probably because you're streaming in science and technology or in

just chatting? Yeah, if I'm doing my main channel streams, I do science technology. Yeah. Well, that's not highly saturated. I also tag it with Linux as well. So if people are looking for specifically Linux content. That's interesting. Yeah, I figured out that this kind of content would probably work good on Twitch because on Twitch you only see developer science and technology streams a lot of game game development streaming and those kind of things

but it's fairly rare that someone streams about linux or about um things that i would do would probably work on twitch um yeah that that would be interesting i'm still experimenting with twitch i don't understand twitch as a platform it's a very it's very weird place um absolutely it's a weird place i i like being there i like seeing like the the weird twitch subculture sort of approach my channel slowly and there's a couple of people i've i've seen sort of find me on twitch and then also check out my main channel stuff which is it doesn't happen all the time obviously most people stick to one platform but i think it it's certainly it's certainly worth experimenting with like there's no downside really of doing restreaming

yeah that is right um so i i would love love to stream on Twitch again, but I still feel that it doesn't really make sense if I don't have the time for streaming. Of course. Well, yeah, don't just stream if you can't stream, but if you're going to stream anyway. But I sometimes watch Twitch. There are a lot of interesting creators currently.

I mainly watch German creators talking about politics right now there's a lot of talks about politics in germany and just chatting and yeah they they make it interesting right and something you can relate to that you just want to watch it's i i have a hard time watching science and technology streams on twitch though because most of these guys just share the screen while they're programming which is kind of boring to watch yeah people have asked me to do programming streams and i know i have some friends who do programming streams as well and i just i find them mind-numbingly boring because you're there's two problems with programming streams one is the guy programming either he will focus entirely on the stream and entirely on sorry on the the development and not talk to the stream or focus entirely on the stream and not get

any development done this is exactly the experience i had because i i watched some of the streams and thought this is something i could also make yeah i'm developing my python discord bot why not stream that and then i thought this is so horrible and people were not watching those kind of streams This is something I could also make. Yeah, I'm developing my Python Discord bot. Why not stream that? And then I thought, this is so horrible. And people were not watching those kind of streams because they are boring. Because if I focus on the chat, I can't do anything in Python. I can't focus on this stuff.

And I just, maybe I write a few lines and then I'm done for the day. Or when I focus on programming, then people, it's boring to watch because you can't interact with the audience, which is the main reason why you should do live streaming. So programming streams doesn't work. What works for my channel is when I live stream

about content that I cover on my videos. And then I randomly switch to other topics. So kind of things or Q&As or this kind of stuff just to connect with my audience and try to find out, hey, when they watch some of my videos, what are the questions they have? Or maybe they have some other suggestions. Just talk to people. And this works pretty well for my live streaming content. But programming streams, I don't know. I don't try it out anymore

i've i've got an experiment coming soon so uh one of my friends wanted to do a programming stream and what she wants to do is a pair programming stream which i think might actually work out kind of interestingly because then you still have that interaction going that wouldn't have been there if you're just programming by yourself i yeah i don't know how it's going to go but i think that pair programming might possibly work yeah that is some someone in my community also suggested that but i i couldn't go into that because of the time. Sure, yeah, yeah. I would like to do it. So one thing that I could imagine, I would really love to do that,

but I don't know if that would work, is a co-working stream. So I've seen other people doing this. They basically just do their usual work with a Pomodoro technique, for example. They spent like a few 30-minute working, and then they spent like a few 30 minutes working and then they spent like five minute break or 10 minute break to talk to the chat and then you can watch the stream because this is what people literally do all the time they they still they turn the stream on while

they're working or doing other things and you can work together with those guys. I've seen other people doing this. It's kind of interesting. I would love to do it, but I'm not sure if the company I'm working for would allow this. Yeah, that's the big concern. Probably not. So this is something that I would really love to do. Maybe once I go full time, I would do that because then I could just stream

when I'm researching topics for my videos and I can make like focus sessions. And then from time to time, talk to people about that and people could watch the stream while they're working. This would be awesome, I guess, but it's like,

Hey, don't have the time. It's just, yeah, it's something that is on my wishlist for, I don't know when. Yeah. Programming,

programming, coworking. That's kind, programming, co-working, that's kind of weird. But I think when it's something that the chat can sort of help you out with, like programming, I think it doesn't work as well because explaining algorithms with someone in chat is kind of difficult. But what I want to do coming up very soon, people are going to keep bothering me about it until I start it,

is I want to do a Linux from scratch series. That is interesting, yeah. And the reason why I think that'll work is because there's going to be points where I get stuck and people in chat, I know there's going to be other people there who have done it before, who can give me some advice on what might work. And if they have an idea and I have a different idea they can be like a bit of a back and forth there And I think that I already tested that theory out by doing a gen 2 install stream So I think it should oh yeah mm-hmm Yeah, that will be interesting you need to tell me if that works because I could imagine that will work pretty well Hmm, I don't know because if you you I think you just need a topic where you can interact with your audience, right? And it can be anything,

but people need to feel to be part of something, right? If you just stream what you're regularly doing, I think no one will care about it. This is why game streaming usually... If people just imagine they become full-time

streamers by just streaming while they're playing computer games this is it's not going to work yeah that's because yeah that's one of the problems a lot of people have when they go into streaming um that's why i didn't start streaming back when i first started making videos um i wanted to become good at being entertaining and then i would do streaming. A lot of people sort of take it the other way around where they start streaming and then try to be entertaining and don't have any idea how to do it. If you can't entertain people with like a five, ten minute video, how do you expect to do it for a three hour live stream? Yeah, that's right.

That's probably right. But I feel like my experience is that most of this stuff comes just from the interaction with the community. And this is kind of the hurdle. The problem is really when I go live, and I had some of these streams where just like 10 people watched. I don't know what to tell, right? I mean, I can randomly stream about something, but then it's not entertaining it's not interesting but once you get a few more viewers like 20 30 viewers once a stream i got 50 viewers which is kind of crazy i don't know what happened this day but there were so many people asking questions um commenting in the chat and it was so much fun because I could always interact with these guys and could answer questions or someone just said, hey, did you know this? And I, I don't know. Maybe just let's look that up on Google and just explore this together with

the community, something like this. Some stupid topics just come out of nowhere. If you have or if you're past that threshold that you have enough people in the chat that can interact with you and then it becomes much easier to stream but that is kind of hard because when you're a beginner you have no viewers so yeah yeah can you get past that that is so hard so that's why i say it's important to know how to be entertaining. Because if you can't entertain an empty chat room,

then you're not going to... While it's certainly easier to entertain people when there are people to bounce off of, but you can't expect people to be there for you to bounce off of. So you sort of have to... No, that's right. You have to be entertaining when... You have to be entertaining to an empty room basically which is very difficult

sometimes i think it all comes down to you need to learn how to make good content and it can be anything right it can be anything but you need to somehow learn it yeah and that's good if you haven't done it before um yeah on youtube it is the best experience to learn it, in my opinion. On live streaming, it's really hard because you have so many hurdles. It is live. You need to talk to a camera. Sometimes you're just talking to yourself because nobody's watching. I think it is much easier to make a YouTube video and start with that than start as a streamer. than start as a streamer.

That is why I personally, even if I would like to make more live streaming, I wouldn't call myself a streamer. I would call myself more a content creator. And live streaming is just a supplemental piece of content I can do on my channel to interact with the audience and so on. But it's like, hey, being a content creator or making videos, that is probably the primary focus. And that is probably easier to start with, right?

So at least it was for me because I just, I really didn and thought, hey, I could do the same, right? And try to figure out how it works and created some basic tutorials and just uploaded it. And what will happen is nobody will watch it. So you get no feedback if it's good or bad, right? And you just upload the second and the third video and just try it again. And at some point, you will realize how it works. On live streaming, it's it's kind of hard because yeah if nobody's watching you how can you improve how can you get feedback

i don't know so i think therefore maybe people have a hard time um doing live streaming that's just my personal opinion i don't know if that's the same for for other people but for me it was really hard that's why i feel like it's really important to have a like some people say like i'm way too hard on myself like hard on myself and like my the way i criticize my videos but i think that that's something you need to have especially if you have like my community i don't know why they're really supportive and most of the time don't point out the problems that I have in a lot of the content. You have the random new person who does,

but the core audience are really nice people. And I need someone to be there to tell me that I've done something wrong. And if no one else is going to be able to do that, I need to be the person who does that. I fully agree with you. I had this discussion yesterday with my wife, the exact same discussion, because I was working on my Kubernetes video and I showed her the thumbnail and said, hey, I'm not quite happy with the focus of the video with the title.

I need to work on this. And she said, hey, are you happy with the video? And I said, yes, the video is good, but I still think there are some things that I could have done better. And she said, hey, if you are happy with the video, that's fine. And I said, no. It's not fine, right?

Because I need to work on this. I need to know what I can improve for the next video. and if you don't have that i think um you will have a hard time improving yourself so you need to be um that or you need to criticize yourself right the main fault you should not make is it shouldn't hurt you right you shouldn't make the assumption that when you do something bad that you are a bad person right or you're not worth um or you're um maybe you push out a video you get a bad comment and you feel like hey i did a terrible mistake and

i'm not as good as other creators or whatever i sometimes have these feelings but i always need to remind myself of hey um right uh i or my i'm i'm rough as a person no matter how many videos i make or how many people like my content right this is not depending it's it's just like, you need to somehow work on the videos, but don't take it personal. This is something that is sometimes hard. But if you or how can I say this, this is something you need to work on. If this is really a problem you have, and I can admit I have this problem from time to time. When someone comments on my videos,

I have no problem with these stupid comments. For example, when I made a video about Linux, why I switched from Linux to Windows. This video got a lot of hate. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, right. I don't know why. I still don't know why. But some people just don't like the fact that I don't use Linux anymore. I don't know um but when i got those stupid comments like hey ah windows is bad and blah blah blah blah i think like yeah okay just i don't care but when they criticize specific technical things on my content that and i know they are correct yeah yeah then it's hurting me then then it's much harder to get over it because i know these guys are right and i did something wrong so then then i have a hard time

working with this but i still feel like you need to ask these questions so um what could you improve and how could you make the next video just better absolutely just summarize Just to summarize it. Actually, that I think is one of the big problems with being a streamer. When you are making regular content, you

almost certainly have to go back and edit it. That's something you can completely avoid as a streamer. You can do a three hour stream and not review review anything you've done you are forced to review what you've done if you like if you just make a regular video so if you maybe misspoke somewhere or you didn't you didn't pronounce something the way you wanted to pronounce it you didn't uh you didn't put the inflection point exactly we wanted to be you can very clearly see all of these points where you can improve upon yeah that is right i i probably should watch my live streams more i usually don't do that because they are then

just too long to watch of course but i yeah. But I just recently started to try to pick some clips for my live streams and add them as an end card for my videos sometimes. And then I'm forced to do that. And I sometimes think like, oh man, what did I say there? But it's like live streams are, I would say, yeah. You don't usually review all of what you've said there um when you when you try to pick some clips it's you sometimes need to go through that and yeah I just want to what I

probably want to get is something like a button that I can push to to add a mark or somewhere this is something I would really love to to get to just add some clips from the live streaming. And you obviously think more about, hey, preparing for these live streams. This is something that I recently started to do because I think you still need to prepare when you talk about some topics. So in the past, I did some random topics for my live stream. I just random stuff, all the same, the generic thumbnails on youtube and i thought i need to change this somehow because there's no point of watching the live streams if i just talk about random stuff or every live stream is a q a and it's all the same

thumbnail then people are seeing that and saying oh yeah he's live again but hey probably not interesting or whatever so i thought about making the live streams related to my last video. So I go live every Thursday on YouTube. I release a video every Tuesday. So I can make this live stream related to my video that I just released two days ago. Because then the most people in my community

have watched this video already and they are ready to talk about it. So this week for example or the week I don't know when you released this video but for example I did this video about Kubernetes so I tried to come up with a topic.

This will be out Thursday next week. Ah okay alright so then it would be So you'll be doing a live stream today sometime? Tomorrow. Today when this comes out yeah exactly

and when I for example I did this video about Kubernetes this is like a tutorial but I thought about some people might have questions so how they should use it or why they should use it but I thought about um some people might have questions so how they should use it or why they should use it so I thought about talking about do you need kubernetes at home do you need to set up a raspberry because I've seen other people doing this setting up Raspberry Pi clusters

with kubernetes and people are always asking so what what should I do with that so um maybe explore this topic a little bit more so when you want to host that at home, or if it really makes sense, in which cases it could make sense and how you're approaching that. And I also could research some things or suggestions from the community as an idea for upcoming videos.

So I think that could be interesting for a live stream and try to make this as a topic. But then I also need to prepare this a little bit, right? I need to maybe search a few links or some other stuff that I want to show to people or I want to discuss or go into that. And then it's becoming much easier to create an appealing title and thumbnail

for this live stream. It's much easier to talk when there's nobody watching and there's nobody commenting or chatting. So that is something that I recently started to work on and I started to explore because I think that just naturally makes sense for the channel that I make and the content that I push out there. So we will see how that goes. I think there's really, that right there sort of demonstrates the big difference between our channels. You have this focus on making informative content,

and you want to make sure your live streams link back to the other stuff you're doing. I guess the best way to describe mine would be more... It's closer to a story time channel. I think that's a better way to put it. I do tutorials. I do reviews. to do a story time channel that's that yeah i think that's a better way to put it like i do i do tutorials i do reviews but the general stuff that i'm doing like let's see what i've got on my list right now what did i record what did i record today i don't even remember um so let's see i've got a video coming out about the fake privacy of encrypted group chats. Basically, the idea is that if you have an encrypted chat and it's a public chat, it's not really encrypted

because literally anyone in that chat could screenshot it and it doesn't matter if it's encrypted. Yeah, that's a great topic. I've got one about... So there's a lot of people who keep calling... who want to apply the Linux model of stable releases and rolling releases to Windows. And there's this weird argument about whether Windows is a rolling release or not. I guess it is to some point, I would say.

Yeah, and I've got a couple of the videos of that nature. So my videos are more like, hey, here's a thing i've been thinking about this week uh here's my thoughts on it or something along that along those lines and then my live streams sort of follow that same sort of idea it's not like i i sometimes i will do sort of more informative live streams i'm like hey let's sort of go over installing gen 2 or let's look at the issues that exist with the arch linux wiki but other times just like hey i'm gonna get some i'm gonna get some vodka and we're gonna drink for a couple hours and play video games and i think that that works for like what i'm trying

to do but it's if i was to do like that sort of live stream on a channel like yours no one would really care about that but that's like that's the sort of stuff that I've sort of built up with over the past two or so years of me making content. Exactly. And I have a hard time figuring out how to integrate those kind of things into my content because that's what we chatted about the last days. I think like, I believe that you have a very, very strong relationship with the audience

because people are following you for the stories you tell for you as a personality and not just for the content for the informative content you push out there. The informative content is what people probably keeps watching, but what makes people subscribing to a channel, I would assume that it's more your personality and your opinions. Well, I try to aim for more of an edutainment style if we want to go with that terminology. Yeah, exactly. So, I would say this is a reason. So, I have the problem on my channel that I mainly focus on tutorials. I did focus on tutorials and I always had this idea of what is the reason that people watch another tutorial on my channel. So, maybe when this is a related tutorial, okay, they probably do. But I had this problem in the past that I covered too many

different topics. And there is no point of watching a Python tutorial and a week later watch a tutorial about cybersecurity that is not in any way related to that Python tutorial. And I also had a hard time figuring out that people who are watching programming tutorials are completely different people than watching operations tutorials. Maybe you can make content about DevOps to bring those two worlds a little bit easier together, but the audience are quite different. I figured it out when I went on Instagram and followed some of the developer content creators on YouTube and Instagram, they make completely different style of videos like the tech content creators. I knew.

And then I realized, okay, there's a, I have a problem here. I need to somehow find, I need to, I need to find my place in that world. I need to somehow establish who I am and what I do a little bit more and show a little bit more my personality and things that I do so that people have a reason to follow me as a person and watch the content that I make. And when it's a Kubernetes tutorial, when it's a cybersecurity tutorial, whatever it is, people want to watch it because of me,

because I'm explaining it and not somebody else but this is hard no i think it's really hard especially when you're just making tutorials and i also think that will take more time because you need to establish your reputation somehow and um i think of how i could integrate some kind of storytelling or personal stuff into my videos. And I have a few ideas, but I don't feel quite ready for it because I don't have the knowledge and the experience to make this content as I want it to be. But that's exactly what I'm working on the next, I would say. But that's exactly what I'm working on the next, I would say. That is the goal for until the end of this year, maybe even for next year to bring my channel or to raise a little bit,

add a little bit more personality into this stuff and show a little bit more of myself and what I'm doing and my experience to go along with the long-term goal of the content of my channel. You can see I put a lot of thought process into that because I think it's really important. So, but yeah, it is, when you're just making tutorials, it's kind of hard to achieve that.

So I think I need to change something. But yeah, we will see how that turns out. It's like the goal for, yeah, the next year. Well, I think you can look at it the same way as like with review channels for example take harris heller there's tons of other people who review microphones and webcams and stuff but you watch a harris heller video because it's harris heller or you watch an epos vox video because it's epos vox you don't just watch it because of the hardware they're looking at or linus tech tips for example like that's another great example that you don't want

like there's tons of other channels that do the exact same thing that they do but you watch it because of the personalities that they've sort of cultivated and i i think that if you if you put enough effort into making that change i think you can make it happen but i honestly can't give you advice for it because i've sort of that's been the direction i've been taking since the start so i i don't know how you would shift into it well i have some ideas um i don't want to go into too much detail, but I think like Show something about My life or my work I think with the goal that I've set for this channel in terms of topics like home server projects

That would be a perfect fit for that because then I could show Something about my personal projects or about what I try to achieve And not just tutorials, but also show a little bit behind the scenes in the videos. And of course, also career tips, because then I could tell much more about my personal experience when going into IT. And it's not like I don't want to be the Harris Heller of tech world or something like this, but it's kind of the...

I got some ideas or inspiration it's kind of the um i i got some um ideas or inspiration from from his kind of videos i i want to focus on so this is yeah this is something i want to slowly start integrating into some of my videos and yeah we will see how that goes i don't know maybe it goes well maybe not but that's what you have to do. You need to experiment and find other ways of exploring new things. Because if you just continue to do what you do and you don't change, I think that may work for a few years, but then probably it doesn't make any fun or you just do the same stuff and it's boring. People's attention span is short, right? you always need to come up with new things i guess well that's as good a point as any to end off the podcast we're just passing two hours right now

uh and i've got to get ready for work at some point so we probably should end it off um so do you have a channel that people should go check out anyone you want to give a shout out to let me just check people should go check out. Anyone you want to give a shout out to? Let me just check. I actually don't have one myself now that I'm looking at it. I probably should have prepared for that. That's fine. I don't prepare. I just put people on the spot.

I just think about who did I do a shout out last time who did you show last time I don't remember I think it was Michael Levan then I also had the real geek

the real geek I think that was your shout out last time yeah you shouted him the first time then I shouted him the next time you know if you don't have one i can give you one no i don't have anyone specific i i probably oh no let me check i i have someone and i forgot him last time on twitter i just need to find this channel well you know because because? Because we mentioned him earlier, go watch Live Overflow.

Great channel. Makes amazing videos. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Live Overflow is awesome. I watched him like... I think that was... I wouldn't say like the beginnings, but a few years ago,

I started watching some of his... Even if I don't watch all of his videos because they are really specific to pen testing, which is not my area to be honest but um i just just like the way how he makes videos i find it really interesting like i don't have any interest in doing pen testing myself but i i i love i love the the idea of what he's doing. It's cool. It's a great channel. You also inspired me a lot because yeah,

he's German and making English content. So that is also some relation we have. So there's one channel I want to give a shout out because I forgot him last time that is Coda Dave. Coda Dave. And he is making DevOps content on YouTube. More and more teams have adopted LinkedIn. Started playing the audio.

Oh, and your camera's now disappeared. Okay. Well, no, that's back. Okay. We're good. Yes. Okay, great. Koda Dave.

Yes. I've got it open now. Yeah. Awesome. So he's got some... So what are you saying? He does DevOps stuff? DevOps stuff, yeah.

A lot of cloud stuff, DevOps, GitHub, secrets, tips and tricks. There's a lot of great stuff on his channel. I like the way how he laid out his channel. So you got some nice playlists there. If you want to get into DevOps, there's a playlist with many videos about this so that's really cool so if you're

into that because we discussed DevOps topic in the beginning a little bit so this is definitely something you want to watch if you want to get into that space yeah and I can see that even though like he's got a very small channel he's got the way he frames his content

is really good yeah wow okay that's right that actually is considerably better than I'm doing geez and why is everyone just way better than what I'm doing maybe because you criticize yourself

too much maybe it's fine I'm working on stuff we're gonna going to move the lights around and hopefully make it look better. I'll see what I can do. You inspire me to work harder. Every time I talk to you and everything looks ten times better than I can do, you inspire me to make my stuff look better. I'm happy if that helps you

in any way, so that's fine then. It absolutely does. So, where can people find you yeah on youtube twitter and instagram as well so everything is just the digital life the digital life yeah but my twitter and instagram is called christian underscore tdl for the digital life right i forgot about that. I will have it linked in the description down below. That'll be the easiest way

to find it. Absolutely. Yeah. Do you have anything else you would like to say? No. I've said so many things. It's always inspiring

and exciting to talk to you and thank you so much for this podcast. I really enjoy that and I usually also listen on that on Spotify. You probably should mention that as well. I just recently found your podcast on Spotify.

Yeah, I am everywhere. Pretty much anywhere that takes an RSS feed, you'll find me. That's awesome. Yeah, so do the outro for the podcast Brody not the main channel if you want to find this podcast as an audio release the audio release is available

basically anywhere the video release is on YouTube and Odyssey I've got my main channel that is Brody Robertson I upload Linux-y videos I guess we call them story time videos. There is a video coming... Actually, wait. It's going to be out.

There's a video that came out at the start of this week. That is going to be about the 30th anniversary of Linux. So check that out if you have not seen it. I didn't realize it was going to be today. Otherwise, I would have got it out earlier. But it will be out by the time this comes out. I've got a gaming channel there's Brody Robinson Plays upload five or so YouTube shorts and two live streams

and I think that's pretty much everything yeah I have anything else to say uh nothing else from you do, no, give me an outro. Oh man, you got me there. But yeah. Thanks for watching awesome podcasts and yeah. If you have time, check out my channel. Please don't do that. Please go check out, please go check out Christian channel. His channel is great.

Uh, thanks mate. Yeah. Thanks everybody for watching and I see you soon. Take care. See you later. Bye bye.