I recently started a Youtube series called Late Night Coding. In 45-ish days, I recorded about 30 videos of myself working on my latest project.

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Why?

I realized that, awkwardly enough, I talk to myself a lot while coding. Because of that, I decided to start recording 15-25 minute videos every day-ish and uploading them to my YouTube channel. Also, I feel that I should clarify that I talk to myself in a “rubber duck” debugging kind of way. If you aren’t familiar, rubber duck debugging is the process of talking through a problem to an inanimate rubber duck in order to get a better understanding of the issue you’re trying to debug.

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Additionally, I want to note that I did not do this for views or to look better on college/job applications. I simply wanted to record myself because I was already talking to myself and… why not multitask?

How?

There’s not much to say here, but I just wanted to mention some technical stuff about how I’ve recorded these videos.

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As some of you may know, I use Arch Linux as my daily driver. I initially expected recording to be challenging, but since I’m using X11 (the “legacy” display server for Linux) instead of Wayland (the newer and hotter display server for Linux – sarcasm intended), there really weren’t any issues. It took about 5 minutes to set up OBS (my recording software of choice), and about 30 to realize that my microphone sounded better without any filters.

What did I learn?

• Predefined goals are wonderful: Set a predefined goal for whatever it is you’re doing – in my case, recording videos. I initially wanted to record whenever I felt like it (about once or twice a week), but I quickly felt pressured to record almost every day. This made me realize that I do exactly this for other things. Speaking of which, I’m doing this right now. I didn’t have any sort of predefined goal of what I wanted to do over Thanksgiving break, so now I’m bouncing between Minecraft, coding, video editing, and other random stuff. If I had set a goal for what I wanted to do, then I could’ve gotten a lot more done.

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• Workflows are really nice: When I started recording videos, I quickly realized that I spent about 20 minutes recording, and then 30 minutes putting together a thumbnail, a description, and more. I took about an hour to put together a template thumbnail and a template description, and that allowed me to minimize my “static time” down to about 5-10 minutes.

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• Social media is extremely random: The only social media I have is Youtube, Dev.to, and Discord, and even then, I don’t consume that much content on a daily basis. For this reason, the randomness of social media algorithms hasn’t really occurred to me. So my first and second videos getting 800 and 50 views, respectively, came as a massive shock. I think that in my case, Youtube was pushing my first video to lots of users for testing purposes. I still have no idea though.

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• Taking a minute to think before speaking is totally ok: I’ve spent most of my life with a pretty severe stutter, which in the past, has made recording anything an absolute nightmare. But this time, instead of quickly giving up, I spent a few days thinking about strategies that might help me. In that time, I recognized that one of the reasons why I stutter is because I rush into things too fast without taking the time to organize my thoughts. After I realized that, I began to take 2-5 second pauses before transitioning to a new “set of dialogue”, and I found that this was extremely helpful. More importantly, I realized that, at least with the style of content that I was doing, nobody really cares if you take 1 second before speaking, or 5 seconds.

The statz

I told myself I wouldn’t obsess over statistics, and I didn’t!

…but in case you were curious, here’s some statistics from my channel. I had 0 subscribers when I started, and about 200 views from these two videos:

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Where to go from here?

Firstly, this is definitely something that I want to keep doing. It serves as a nice challenge for me, and secondly, this (and a bunch of stuff for scholarships) has given me the inspiration to start dorking around with video editing software like Davinci Resolve. At some point in the future, I’d love to start making higher quality/fully edited videos.

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Overall, this has been quite an enjoyable experience, and I’m glad that I’ve been able to learn so much from it.