
Ask HN: Would you watch Infrastructure/DevOps Screencasts? - joe-stanton
I&#x27;ve found that many of my colleagues are eager to learn more about modern infrastructure techniques. In an effort to become more full-stack and better support some of our apps in production. This is especially true of developers arriving via Code Schools rather than from a traditional CS background.<p>Topic Ideas:<p><pre><code>  * Docker&#x2F;Containerisation (ECS)
  * Service Discovery (Etcd, Serf, Consul)
  * Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible etc.)
  * Monitoring techniques
  * Capacity planning
  * Security best practices
</code></pre>
There doesn&#x27;t seem to be much out there addressing this &quot;need&quot;, except https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sysadmincasts.com&#x2F; which seems abandoned these days.<p>Would this kind of screencast be of interest to anyone? I&#x27;m thinking I could charge a subscription fee for it. Small bite size lessons. Any further thoughts or topic ideas?<p>Thanks!
======
WestCoastJustin
Hey, Justin from [https://sysadmincasts.com/](https://sysadmincasts.com/)
here. Ah, not abandoned just hard to find time. It was taking about 2-3 hours
per minute of video if you include all the researching and editing. After
joining Docker I just did not have any spare time. Want to get back to it
eventually.. one day :) It was incredibly rewarding building something that
people find useful and I still get emails every few days from people.. saying
"Thanks!". If you go down this road -- at least there is that! It also opened
lots of doors. In that a resume was almost irrelevant. So, having said all
that, you cannot really go too wrong by helping people, learning new
technologies, having doors opened for you, etc. Even if you make no money,
like I was (compared to what a company will pay you), you can still do really
well.

I created kind of a checklist of things that made the site somewhat successful
@
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837727).

Some personal thoughts if you go down this path. It take a long time to build
a following (think 1+ years). Make sure you get RSS feed & email list going
from day one (this was a big selling point). I went down the subscription path
and was making about $1-2k/month (at $14/month). That was after spending a
year putting in 60 hour weeks. Transcripts and diagrams came in really handy
in driving traffic to the site. Google was really helpful in building a
following. Not saying it cannot be done just that you need to really love what
you're doing (in that you'll want to give up before you see a return). Do not
skimp on production quality. Having highly edited content with premium audio
makes these worth watching (that's the differentiator from other content).
Just watch railscasts.com and you will instantly see that quality vs some
random youtube videos.

Burnout can also be a real thing here. You paint yourself into somewhat of a
corning, in that you are charging a monthly free, for something that requires
creative juices. I found there to be real pressure to produce new and exciting
content, but what if it is not polished enough or up to your production
quality control bar? Might be a good idea to have somewhat of a backlog so
that you fall back on in the event you have writers block. I had a few
episode, where I just could not write for a couple weeks, or the content was
just not up to my production standards yet. You'll also find that as you
progress into writing something, you'll think of a much better way to tell the
story, then you'll want to re-write on a tight timeline. It was brutal having
to produce on a timeline like that.

~~~
joe-stanton
Wow, thanks for the response Justin. Very useful to get your perspective on
this. I have some teaching experience (Code Schools etc.) but this would be my
first attempt at screencasting. Very useful to hear some of these issues first
hand!

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Feel free to ping me (email in profile) if you have any questions, want to
chat, or need advice.

~~~
joe-stanton
You're too kind! If I pursue this, I will definitely be in touch.

------
dozzie
You know what is more important for a infrastructure/devops engineer,
previously simply called "sysadmin"? Understanding several compilers and
interpreters (and actually learning several programming languages). Unix C API
(fork(), exec(), file descriptors, pipes, sockets, and others). Understanding
how services daemonize and how they log. Learning how packaging systems work,
how to build a new package, and how to install it. Learning what can be
read/detected about the system and what does this information mean. Learning
how does the networking work (address configuration, resolver, routing,
firewall, packet inspection). Traditional networking helpers, along with
several protocols carried out by hand. NSS and PAM, and how the accounts work.
And many, many more _basic_ things.

I've never seen anybody understanding the basics, who would have any trouble
picking up anything that was a fad in the last ten years _from its
documentation directly_. On the other hand, I've seen Docker or Ansible
fanboys that couldn't unify accounts across dozen servers in a sensible way,
despite their "modern automation" tools.

And screencasts are the second most useless way of conveying technical
material (the top one being podcasts). You can't skim through the material,
you can't search it, you can't copy-paste it, you can't print its fragments,
it's inherently hard to navigate.

~~~
markatto
I share your sentiment that there are way too many copy-paste "devops" people
in the industry these days; I always thought the idea was to hire people with
both sysadmin and coding skills, yet a perplexingly high proportion of people
I interact with these days have neither. I'd never choose to hire somebody who
can't describe a tcp handshake, explain what epoll_wait() does or whiteboard a
hashtable, but that's the state of our industry (and, probably, why those of
us who can are in such high demand...)

Nonetheless, it seems silly to complain about a lack of knowledge and then
complain about somebody trying to share knowledge. I've definitely wanted to
lock coworkers in a room with a copy of _The_Linux_Programming_Interface_
before, but maybe a video series on similar topics would be better-received.

~~~
brogrammer90
How does it feel to know these devop types are a decade younger and make the
same if not more money than you?

------
benzesandbetter
Definitely interested.

btw, I love [https://sysadmincasts.com](https://sysadmincasts.com) and would
love to see more sites like it.

------
kevindeasis
I would watch it.

So, essentially the egghead.io for Infrastructure/DevOps. If you made it
cheaper than egghead.io I would sign up.

------
tmaly
Its not as visual as screen casts, but I would go for a podcast. When I have
downtime or I am driving, this is my preferred learning medium.

~~~
arrmn
Which podcasts are you listening for the purpose of learning?

~~~
tmaly
I picked up a few tech podcasts off this thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836023)

My other method is to use the discover podcast feature. The Pocket casts app I
use, has a discover option that lets me search for new podcasts by keyword. I
think it just goes to one of the major podcast indices and pulls from there
but I am not 100% sure.

------
alistproducer2
I would definitely be interested in this.

------
ShaneOG
I'm interested

------
gglitch
I'm in.

------
devcheese
Yes.

------
i336_
It would be really cool to find the sweet-spot between "twitch.tv-like free-
for-all that eventually devolves like medium did" and "site run by select
group of individuals that eventually develop a clique" \- somewhere that lets
enough people post so nobody gets too burnt out, but not so many people that
it's just like the million and one other videos of this sort of thing on
YouTube.

Basically find the balance between supply and demand so that most subscribers
have watched _all_ of a given uploader's past videos, while new users won't
feel like they have 1000TB of old content they need to go through to catch up.

It wasn't until I read WestCoastJustin's comment
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670868))
that I thought that something like this might be run as a top-down project
with a chartered (for want of a better word) set of specific contributors - my
initial interpretation was a social approach, where many people could upload
videos and become well-known for their experience in specific areas (but still
following along with a set of themes specific to your site).

What might be really cool is a system of competitions/incentives/rewards that
encourage people to submit high-quality content, along with eg funding small
events/hackathons/the like. That sounds like it would be a lot of fun!

Besides DevOps and infrastructure I would also highly recommend you add
"enough focus on current programming languages to fully comprehend devops from
the dev side of the fence" \- focusing on how the engine works without driving
the car and seeing the scenery will be boring :D (Translation: go maybe one or
two steps beyond TodoMVC, but leave it at that. Then people's appetites have
been whetted - which is kind of the idea!)

On a slightly less positive note, this concept reminds me of a service that
provides screencasting services for programmers; one of the founders (who may
have (had(?)) some mental health issues) who began accusing a video uploader
of certain actions in a very confusing way. Not drawing any conclusions
myself; the comments (go to your HN settings (username, top-right) and turn
_showdead_ on to see them all) are over here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486476)

I first learned about that service a few months before the linked events
happened, and I'd initially filed the site away as something that might
potentially be fun to use; I'm not sure how I would proceed to use that
service now that this has happened, because I wouldn't want to be caught up in
a similarly bewildering sequence of events myself.

Since DevOps is a very interesting subject to me, a site like this would fill
a definite hole. I can't promise I'd immediately be able to use the site
myself (for current specific reasons that may for all I know have changed by
the time the site is up) - but the idea sounds really cool.

