Thoughts on my channel

Hey, what's up? My name is Chris and welcome to Coding in Public. All right. Well, I haven't posted for like I don't know a month or something like that. Not that that many people have said stuff about it, but I I wanted to talk through kind of what happened, where I'm at right now, and what the future of the channel is. If you like verbal processors just doing their thing, then stick around. If not, no worries. Okay, so what happened? Uh, nothing too exciting. I just went on a long trip for a couple weeks, got sick, and then also took time off work. So all those things compounded to me not having as much time to make videos and I couldn't really record them with being sick. So stuff just didn't happen for a few weeks. Then we hit the holiday season and it felt weird to like drop stuff on Christmas. Um so all that to say I kind of accidentally took a break. But here we are. Um how we got here. Uh well let me talk a little bit more meta about the channel in particular. I started the channel just because I wanted to like as I was learning stuff to explain it. That's really how I find like things are solidified or not in my own mind. often I would like work really hard on talking through something I just did that week only to realize like I did not understand it at all. Well, I'd scrap that video idea and just really get back to the basics, understand what was going on, and then hopefully the videos were better for it. But in a sense, like my channel has always been for me. Um, and that means that I'm not choosing like sensational content or things that I think people really want to watch or that kind of stuff. It's mostly just stuff that I enjoy or stuff I'm currently learning and I want to make sure I understand it. Now, uh, I should also mention that a lot of YouTube dev stuff especially is just way down on viewership because people are just turning to AI quicker. They don't really care if they understand it. They just want to get the thing done. Totally understand that. That's not something I've ever cared about. Um, in the sense that I didn't get into development to get stuff done in particular. It was just a side hobby uh that I thought was fun. And so I got into it because it was fun. And that's still what I love about development. I still love handrolling a bunch of stuff, CSS, HTML, JavaScript framework stuff. Like hand rolling it to me is like where all the joy is. That being said, I have like obviously started to incorporate AI hopefully intelligently into my workflow, but I've never been somebody who's really been about getting stuff done. I've really been here for the the the giggles, you know, I just I do it for fun. I enjoy it. Um, but I'm realizing that like maybe there's a space in that kind of world where I can still kind of get the best of both worlds. So, I'm playing around with that a lot. Um, but like how does that impact what I do for videos? Do I talk about what I'm learning with like my agentic workflows or that kind of thing? Um, or do I mostly stick on like kind of the fundamental understanding of like how things work and talk through more like core webdev things that I'm learning or going over myself. So, that's kind of what happened where we're at right now and kind of why I'm not sure where to go next with the channel. Um, and kind of who the target channel audience is. It's it's kind of me. And so I want to figure out like really the answer to the question that I started with when I started the channel, which is what would help me learn the best. And for me, I don't know. I I kind of split one is I keep doing smaller videos that would probably include things like how I use AI and like stuff on Astro and you know, Next.js stuff or whatever. Um, React stuff. Um, CSS for sure. Uh, there's so much with CSS I want to do videos on because I've like been doing so many cool things with CSS on the side. So that's one thing I could just kind of keep doing what I was doing. Um, and I think that there's certainly space for that. The question is what helps me learn the best. On the other hand, I've kind of gotten to a point where a lot of the smaller videos, like I don't really need to like go back and teach through it. I I understand the concept concepts and it's mostly for other people that I'm recording those. And with not as many people viewing, that doesn't really seem to make a ton of sense unless I want to start chasing that, which I don't. Spoiler alert. Um, I really enjoy like the channel. It's fun for me. It's therapeutic. It's not a burden. um because I've kind of kept it in that space. That's for me. It's never work. It's just something I enjoy doing. Uh so the other path I could go is to do more long form content. So do a three-hour deep dive on like everything you need to know about Figma as a developer. Mostly because I'm like I really need to work with Figma better. Especially as I work with the designers, I need to understand like how do I how do I interact with this? How do I, you know, whatever understand files? How do I create them myself? And there's a lot around that that I think could be super interesting for me to learn. And only a deep dive allows me to do that kind of stuff. Uh or I could do like a 10-hour free course on an e-commerce site with Astro, for instance, if I go that route. They would be like, you know, 10 to 12 videos uh a year, maybe some live streams as well. But I would really get to like delve into like, okay, how do I architect this whole system? And that part for me would be really helpful. It would allow me to kind of talk through it, make sure I understand it. And I'm definitely in the space where I need to be exploring more full stack solutions and kind of more like a systems level thought on stuff instead of just saying like here's a cool CSS property. Um, so that's the question that's before me, like what would help me learn the best? And forgive me if that sounds like selfish, but I think that's also what's allowed the channel to be like authentic and just who I am. And I'm not trying to chase anything. And hopefully you've sensed that uh if you watch a lot. Okay. Well, thanks for that therapy session. That's uh that's kind of how we got here. Uh where I am kind of presently and thoughts about future for the channel. Realistically, I think what's going to happen is I'm going to focus on Astro 6 the next little bit here. So, I may start dropping some small videos and then certainly once Astro 6 launches, which I'm guessing is going to be very soon, do a deep dive on what Astro 6 offers, update my course. So, I don't know how much that will take me away from the channel and then get back into some kind of posting schedule. Um I don't know which route I will take. So, if you have a consideration, um maybe I'll just swap between the two. I'm not really sure. Um but I mostly want to really continue to kind of be authentic to why I started this journey in the first place, and I feel like that will give you the best content as well. Um but I'm always interested in uh your thoughts if you happening. All right. Well, thanks so much. I hope you have a blessed day wherever you're at, and happy coding.