koaning.io

I've been doing developer relations for over five years now, and YouTube has been a big part of that. The marimo channel sits around 1.5 million views and 10k subscribers after a year, so I like to think I've learned a thing of two that others might learn from.

I'm writing this for DevRel people who might be curious to upload videos to share their (hopefully good) ideas.

• YouTube is a huge. It stands as one of the largest search engines ever now. If you have a tool that's worth knowing about, odds are people are going to learn from it by searching on YouTube as opposed to Google. That means that either you put a video there such that you can own the message, or you're going to have to accept the voice of some influencer to do this for you.
• Thumbnails and titles are important. People click before they watch something. As always in life, try to keep things simple. You can overdo it with thumbnails. But a small pro tip. Try to go for a background that's common across all the videos. That way if someone likes your content, your background is a thing that they will recognize.
• Hooks matters less than story. Grabbing a hook to pull someone's attention tends to be common advice, but it will only get you so far. If you overpromise, people will remember and it's your job to stand out as a reliable source of information. So instead of worrying about the introduction, maybe you should worry about the full story of the video first. Once the story is solid, making the introduction is going to be a lot easier.
• Short form content is increasingly becoming the norm. It's content that's easier to make, easier to get high view numbers for, but it's also content that shows up much less when users search for you.
• Subscribers matter way less than they used to. It used to be the case that the algorithm would favor a high subscriber count. It feels that that's less the case. It's more preferred that you have a video that is watched till the end.
• Resist the views temptation. Views, that's the thing that's measurable. But that's also a distraction. Remember that anything you do on YouTube is meant to be a funnel for "another thing" you're trying to promote. Views matter less than that "other thing". It's not necessarily the case that download numbers correlate with view counts on YouTube. So you want people to see your video, sure, but the video should also convince people to do something after they see it. Influencers might care more about viewcounts for their sponsors, but you should care
• Analytics are deceiving. A view doesn't imply a single person saw one video. If it's a YouTube short a view is counted twice, or even three times, if the video loops back to the start. More important metrics exist, like number of (new) viewers, but these require a drill down in analytics.
• Show don't tell. Too many videos don't take the actual efforts to even run a line of code. When you're doing developer relations, you're talking to adults here. So why would you repeat what's listed on the documentation page? Go a step further. Be enthusiastic. Show that you care!
• Having a popular channel is very valuable. When the channel was small, it was hard for us to find guests who might want to appear on a livestream. Now that the channel is bigger, there's a lot more inbound for this. Sure, it might take a year before you get there, but do consider it's an investment. One that can pay off well.
• Buy decent gear. The camera matters less than the microphone. But you can't expect to get people to take your video serious with a potato quality video.

Just some points, feel free to take a lesson out of it. I also have this video and this video on my recording setup for extra details.

uv is amazing but it does come with a sneeky little downside. Every time and you create a cache there's a good chance that it will stick around for-ever. Especially if you create many demo projects with their own environment.

That's why, like flossing, you'll want to frequently do this:

uv cache prune 

Just today this saved 168.2Gb from my drive!

This paper had an interesting chart:

Notice how this marathon chart has spikes at precise half-hour marks? These numbers are self reported and they also serve as an interesting reminder not to trust data at face value.