
Destroy All Software screencasts free this week - pvsukale3
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts
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AlexB138
Nice quality content, I'll definitely take advantage of the free period. The
cost to sign up seems very high for what this is though. I expected a one time
cost, or maybe $5 or so a month. $290 annually seems expensive for a single
format of lessons from a single teacher. Even the current promotion seems
onerous. As a point of comparison, Safari Books Online does sales for $199
annually just about every year and has content from countless instructors in
many formats, including live training. Perhaps I'm missing some information,
as I only read the sale page before viewing content.

Not posting this to complain. I'd really like to see quality content like this
reach more eyes, and I hate to see the author shoot themselves in the foot by
putting up such a high barrier to access it. It's entirely possible I'm just
not aware of the costs that go into creating this content.

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thomasmeeks
The cost to produce quality content is quite high. Even if you are "only"
putting together a screencast, the cost of learning that content, planning how
to teach it, editing it, and inevitable retakes can all easily stretch to 20x
the length of a video. I'd call that estimate fairly optimistic, to be honest,
it can go much higher.

To use an example I'm familiar with: Code School courses took about 6 or so
hours to complete (including challenges), but take 4-6 months of effort by an
average of 4 people at any given time to create. We tried many times to
tighten that timeline up, but being too aggressive inevitably resulted in a
course we weren't 100% happy with.

Pricing isn't as obvious as it seems, as well. We raised our prices from 25/mo
to 29/mo ages ago, which was a large net positive for the company from a
revenue standpoint. We ran pricing tests a few times, as well, and anything
below 29/mo performed much worse overall (we didn't get enough extra signups
at a lower cost to break even). Sales & free weekends have a big impact,
though.

As I've watched the space coalesce it seems like the very successful companies
will be the ones that create some kind of "degree" (accreditation doesn't
matter, only how much the community trusts them) for individuals, or companies
that chase down enterprises for continuing education dollars. Or both. Both
tend to charge a premium over that 290/yr price point, which you need to in
order to be wildly successful due to the massive churn in the education space.

All that to say, from my perspective, $290 a year is very reasonable, and is
probably the right price point.

Source: was the CTO of Code School

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gravis7777
Free market will judge the right price. Lots of people put free content out
there, some of it pretty good. Not as good as Code School's content, but
people have to see the value difference. Just because you put a lot of hours
in doesn't mean people will appreciate it and pay more for it.

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jacobkg
Some exceptional content on writing tests in the early seasons.

Also a great demonstration of what a very skilled typist can do in vim.

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skandl
Dunno what's up with the name (being silly I think) but anyway these are well
done! Just watched the Malloc From Scratch one:
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/mallo...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/malloc-
from-scratch)

~~~
buovjaga
Borrowed from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroy_All_Monsters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroy_All_Monsters)
"a 1968 Japanese science fiction kaiju film featuring Godzilla"

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staticelf
One of my favorite talks ever is
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat)

~~~
gravis7777
He said Captain, I said...

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jypepin
Oh boy, what a great source of content. Is there a curated list of the
best/most popular ones?

edit: ok the sales page has recommendations from the author:
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/sale](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/sale)

~~~
steveklabnik
Personal list of favorites:

Functional Core, Imperative Shell/Boundaries are two versions of the same
talk. One of the best talks I have ever seen on software development,
articulates some really great concepts about software design. Applicable in so
many places.

Sucks/Rocks series: this one is specific to Rails, but if you write Rails, is
quite good. Gary doesn't write things the same way that most people write
things, and for good reasons. This explains the details. See also "Fast tests
with and without Rails", which you can probably generalize to other frameworks
fairly easily.

The "stubs and mocks" sections, together, are really good: Gary is a fan of
mocking, and many people aren't. He talks a lot about why, and how to properly
mock things.

I just watched "malloc from scratch" yesterday and really enjoyed it.

The conference talks are already free, but while you're digging into DAS...

I very much recommend "The Birth and Death of JavaScript". It basically
predicted WebAssembly before WebAssembly existed, and is just a really
excellent talk regardless of the subject. You'll see why when you watch it.

"Ideology" is also a fantastic talk about things programmers believe and why.

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klez
> It basically predicted WebAssembly before WebAssembly existed

I really love that talk, but this is a bit of a stretch considering that it
could apply to asm.js as well, which was available the year before the talk
was recorded. Remember the unreal engine demo on Firefox?

~~~
steveklabnik
Yeah, that might be fair. I feel like Wasm is a pretty significant step over
asm, and is much closer to the world presented in the talk, but it would also
be 100% reasonable to just be talking about asm. Good point.

(I was lucky enough to see the talk live, so the timeline of events gets a
little messed up in my head sometimes...)

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neduma
Wat?

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hexo
nice pun

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unwind
Meta: mods please make it "screencasts".

There are enough cats online. :)

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azhenley
This is already a difficult to read title. I think the company name should be
cased properly, to at least hint that it is a noun, and possibly make it
possessive: Destroy All Software's.

