Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Akio and if you've ever looked
up anything with regards to Python online, you might have
come across our Young Akas AKA Our Young Codes.
Today he's my guest on the podcast as well and we cover his
origin story. Starting out as educator at the
University of Utrecht, venturing in startups as an entrepreneur.
High highs and low lows to eventually becoming a content
creator on YouTube and again, an educator.
Such a joy to listen to his episode.
So enjoy Beyond Coding and is this the the first podcast
you've done? Actually, yes.
Yeah. Yeah.
OK. You're you're my.
I don't know how you call that thing.
The first podcast, Let's give it to that, yeah.
That sounds a bit more friendly. Yeah.
Are you planning to do more? Yeah, I I really like the idea
of maybe at some point starting my own podcast.
Not not really the interview format that we're having now,
but more like I wanna do it together with some of my
teammates and we just, you know, have a chat about software and
whatever we're working on. Also kind of to give a
background on what we as team are doing.
Yeah, the people. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.
Yeah, that's nice. I had a friend of mine, Luca
Rossi, and he does the refactoring newsletter on Sub
Stack which is gaining a lot of popularity.
And then now he back then when we had the conversation, we
mostly covered about content and written form content, what he
does. And then afterwards I was like,
have you ever thought about like expanding?
And I was like, yeah, I've always wanted to do kind of a
podcast, but he doesn't really listen to a lot of audio
components. He says I I read a lot and then
writing because of that makes a lot of sense.
But now I see he's actually started his podcast and I mean
since he's been doing content, he knows kind of how to start.
So his line up of like the 1st 10 episodes are like super good
basically. So I'm sure he's going to go off
with a head start, which is really cool for him.
Yeah, it really helps. Like if you're already doing
content you already know, like, OK, I need the schedule and I
need these steps and this is the stuff that I'm going to need to
record this properly. Yeah, so it just saves so much
time if you already know how to do that.
Yeah, it's it's kind of a learning process.
You have to have experienced that before, yeah?
But before you got into content creation I I had a look at your
LinkedIn profile and you were a long, long time professor like
at the University of Utrecht if I recall correctly.
Yeah, that's right. You have very long time.
Yeah, for about like, I think 10 plus years.
Yeah. What?
What made you decide to first of all, start doing that, like as a
professor teaching others? And then also, why'd you stop
'cause it was a long time. Well, I always liked teaching.
I I always liked seeing that moment where, like the penny
drops with someone and you're like, oh wow, now you now you
get it. I I found it's a really cool
process. And so for me that combined with
computer science, which I've always been interested in, like
since a kid, I've always been playing around with computers
and programming and just, you know, I thought it was a lot of
fun. So for me, it was always clear
that I wanted to move into that area.
So for me, it was also completely logical to just OK,
so I need to build software and I want to teach you about it.
That's what I want to do. So I know my career path, yeah.
That's awesome. That's yeah.
So that's also how I ended up at Utah University.
When I started there, there was a lot of focus on gaming and
game development. It was like a whole new bachelor
that they were setting up on, teaching people how to build the
games. But it was really not so much
about building the games themselves, but more about
understanding the concepts behind game development, which
are like general computer science concepts actually, when
you think about it, right, But you can teach programming with,
I don't know, a spreadsheet program or whatever, but you can
also teach it by using a game. So that was the whole idea.
And so that's how it started there.
And at the same time, I was also doing quite a bit of research,
which I I also liked. It kind of address the
engineering needs of me. So I did a lot of work with
motion capture systems, animated characters, those kind of
things. And and so we set up this whole
motion capture lab with like these cameras with you know,
tracking software and markers and things like that, which was
a lot of fun to work with. But yeah, at at some point you
also notice, like, OK, so we're doing this at the university
level, but at the same time, you have these companies that are
spending like millions and millions on creating like the
best setups ever. And I felt like we were not
really contributing that much anymore.
Might also be that I'm just a bad researcher, right?
But. It's a different scale.
Yeah, yeah, definitely is, yeah. I can see that.
And and then you also start to wonder like, OK, so I I do this
work and I write these papers, but how many people actually
read them? And does it have like enough
impact and can I do maybe something else that has more
impact than doing this? And and so that's also when I
sort of focused more on the teaching part of the job.
Because if you work as a professor at university, you
always have this balance, right, teaching and doing research.
And in a sense, it's kind of problematic because when you
want to be good at teaching, you can't spend enough time on doing
great research. And if you want to become, like
the best researcher ever, then you can't spend a lot of time on
becoming a great teacher. So you always have to balance
these two. And the problem is that when you
try to be good at one thing, you kind of get criticized at the
other thing, the other way around.
So it's a in that sense, it's a very stressful environment to
work in because you always have these two things that you're
doing at the same time. But.
You can decide kind of the ratio.
Well, it's in a sense, yes, Like most professors, they have like
a 5050 ratio. But then if you don't do well on
the research end, you get more teaching.
And that actually has the opposite effect, kind of because
then you have you have to do more teaching, right.
They also call it a teaching load, which I found a very
strange term for something that's half of your job.
It's supposed to be fun, right? How is that load?
No, it's supposed to be fun. So you get a higher teaching
load. But that means you can spend
even less time on research, which means you can do even less
and then you get even more teaching and then you kind of
get in this, I don't know, vicious cycle.
Yeah, you can't get out of that. Yeah, exactly.
OK, yeah. Did you find yourself kind of in
that loop as well, where you maybe wanted to do more research
but you had more teaching load or vice versa?
Well, the weird thing was that actually like, well, let's put
it this way, the image that a lot of people at university have
is that basically research is better than teaching.
Like, if you can do more research, that's better, OK.
And I had to actually, for myself, the opposite feeling
like I enjoy teaching more actually, than doing research.
But it felt kind of like, yeah, I don't know, like a secondary
thing to be doing, like, oh, so you're not good at research.
OK, so then. Then you do that.
So then you just do that. And I didn't really like that
that feeling that much, because to me, teaching is actually a
much more important job than doing research.
I think it's way more valuable to spread the word about
something than just to dive in very deeply into a single
technical thing and solve that, even though that can also have
huge impact, of course. But still, I find teaching is at
least as valuable as research. And that was something that,
yeah, drove me to kind of re rethink of it, about OK, am I in
the right place here And maybe I should change what I do and do
something else for a while. OK.
Timeline wise, when was this? Was it about 10 years ago?
Yeah. So I I left university in 2016.
OK, so around that time. You might have, you might have,
then kind of see my friend, because I was in high school and
I always, I played a lot of video games.
I wanted to be a game developer, but then I didn't have, I didn't
have the, let's say, math credentials to get into that
course. Yeah.
So I did information science instead.
But one of my friends actually did game development,
specifically at the University of Utrecht, and then he would
always show like kind of what he had built.
And then in information science, we kind of did both business
theory as well as a bit more data science.
So I could relate things here and there.
But it was always cool to see, like he was very specifically
focused on game development. I don't think he does game
development now, but I I look back fondly at kind of that
that, yeah, experience I guess together with him to see kind of
the insights. Yeah, it's in, in a sense, the
game development area is very attractive to students because
it's like, oh, game's fun. But then when you actually have
to get a job in the game industry, it's a very different
story, right? There's a lot of competition and
lots of games fail and it's it's a really hard industry to be in,
very stressful actually. So a lot of people, they end up
going in a different direction in any case.
So yeah. Yeah, I think we do the same
thing now. Yeah.
Which is funny to think about. Yeah, different backgrounds
gonna same same, same thing. Yeah.
But then you mentioned you were kind of, let's say, maybe at the
end of your line. When it comes to that period at
the University of Utrecht, what did you do afterwards?
Did you go to a company because of that kind of greater impact?
What was the next step there? So for me, I always, I always
wanted to start my own company. I had this I think probably kind
of romantic view of what that was supposed to be like.
But I also got this realisation for myself like OK, so this is
university is maybe not the right place for me anymore And
at the same time one of my ex colleagues, so he had was quite
successful in creating game companies, had sold a few
companies mark overmarks. Maybe you you heard of him, but
then I talked with him and I said, yeah, look, I I want to
make a switch, right? I want to do something else.
And then we kind of together came up with the idea of, hey,
maybe we should start a company and and build something cool
because he was also looking for something new.
So that's what we decided to do. So it was a very weird thing to
do because you go from a completely safe, secure job,
right? University is permanent,
contract, whatever. Very stable.
Nobody expects you to make this move.
You're supposed to do this until the end of I Know Your Career,
and making that step, it felt like really naughty.
Like you're not supposed to. Do that I'm not supposed to do
this is not the game I'm supposed to be playing, right.
And I also noticed that with some of my colleagues who were
like, oh, really? Are you going to do that?
That's like so scary. And what are you going to do if
it fails? And like, yeah, I I don't know.
Yeah. And of course we did actually
completely fail. But but I actually don't regret
it for a moment. It was for me one of the best
decisions I took because it really helped me view the world
kind of in a in a different way. In a sense, starting a company
is not really about the company. It's really a process of self
learning and I found this very interesting to discover this,
that's you because a company works so differently and
especially if you start a new company, there's so many things
you need to learn. You need to do everything
yourself because you don't have a team like you know at
university. If you want to buy a new
computer, well, you have to go to the IT department and they
have all kind of processes in place.
And then you get hopefully your new computer.
But in a company, you go to a website, you buy a computer.
That's it, right? So it's nice that you can move
that fast. But at the same time, it also
means that if you make a mistake, it is actually your
fault. And with when you work in a
large organization, you can be like, yeah, you know, that
department did something wrong. So it's not my fault or this
person did that. So it's not my fault, but at a
company it's basically, yeah, it's you.
Yeah, so I found that very interesting.
But it also means that you put yourself into a very extreme
learning mode because, you know, there's money that's running out
and you have to do something, do something useful, make sure that
it works and there's limited time and you feel that stress
all the time. It's a continuous thing that's
always in the back of your mind, so, but that also makes it one
of the most interesting and exciting experiences ever.
Yeah, starting a company is a process of self learning.
I I I always said I want to start my own company.
I still say I want to start my company.
The more and more podcast episodes I do, the more it's
also out on the Internet. At some point I feel like I have
to do that, but it's it's partially for having that
ownership. I like having ownership and
autonomy to make decisions, and the only reason I haven't
started my company is partially fear and risks.
Obviously, all those things your colleagues said to you, it's
probably also in your head. It's definitely also in my head.
But also I have autonomy and I feel like I can.
I can make responsible decisions with the job that I have now.
As soon as I lose that, then something is going to irk me and
it's either going to be seeking that elsewhere or seeking that
or creating kind of my own environment.
I feel like and starting out, you never have this vision that,
oh, this is going to fail. I think, I think, I mean, I
watch a lot of Shark Tank. Some people say, OK, we start
this up and we work towards an acquisition.
But still you're building up something and whether that's an
acquisition or it goes on for a long, long time, you never
expect it to fail. You just now gave, like, a
little spoiler alert that it definitely did.
Yeah, I mean, if you start a company, you have to be like
ridiculously optimistic about everything because I think the
statistic is 90% of start-ups fail.
Yeah, that's a hard one. That's a really hard one.
So that means that, well, probably it's going to fail,
right? And if if you start a company
with that idea, well, I'll, I'll come back to that later.
But if you start like that, that's not a really good start.
You have to be like, OK, this is gonna work.
I'm gonna make this work, but the exception I'm I'm better
than the rest of the world, right?
And then you learn that it's not the case.
That's a hard one also. Yeah, but it's also a very
valuable lesson. And I think that's to me is like
an extrapolation of how it works in the, in the university
actually, where a lot of the things that you do are related
to your ego building. Because you know, if you it
already starts in school, right, you get your diploma and so you
are, you know, I don't know, engineer and this title, this
and this title, it's about you. And at the university that
process actually continues. After that you do a PhD, which
is again a personal title. Then you'll become, I don't
know, a postdoc, and then an assistant professor or an
associate professor or a full professor.
It's all about titles, titles, titles.
And you are being invited to give keynote talks at
conferences and write papers where your name is on it.
So it's very much ego driven in a sense.
And that also makes it very easy to forget that it's actually not
about you, it's about doing the research or teaching other
people so that they can to computer science.
And so it's it's really easy to to have like a huge build up
your ego and think like, oh, I'm actually really important and
it's all about me. Whereas if you have startup
company and you fail miserably and you know it's your fault,
that does a very good job of removing that ego part that you
built up in the years before. So for me, having a failure was,
I feel, a necessary step in order to progress.
So that's why I also mentioned that it's really to me a
personal learning experience. Yeah, part of the self
development, yeah. Would you say that kind of
coming out of university, the titles and maybe your previous
experience getting into kind of this educational journey got a
bit to your head as well. I mean, you must have seen it
with your colleagues as well. Yeah, I mean, I I don't want to
like single out colleagues like OK, they also like you.
No, I mean it it's very hard to not let that happen, I think and
because everybody around you kind of confirms that idea of
how important that is. Yeah, that's what I was
thinking. And it definitely effects you
for sure, yeah. And I think it also created for
myself an environment when I started my first company where I
had the idea, yeah, I know, you know, I'm, I'm so good.
I'm just gonna do this and do this.
So the optimism is important, but it shouldn't come from your
ego. It should come from a true value
of the idea that you have and being enthusiastic about that
and the impact that you're gonna have with it.
So that's for me, a process that I went through for sure.
I I can. I mean, right now if you were to
tell tell me like I had an ego back then, I would never say
that that's the case. You seem so humble with the way
you come across and also the little things you're willing to
share that I would never say that's the case.
Yeah, I mean, it's actually when you throw it out of the window,
the ego. Then you can also talk about it,
I feel, because it's not important anymore.
I like that. But now, of course, if so, I'm
running now this YouTube channel for two years, and then it's
very dangerous to not let that same thing happen again because
you're like, oh, people watch my video like 1000 times.
So I must be very important. No, no, no, you're not
important. It's not about you.
Yeah, I like that a lot. Before we get into kind of what
you do now, I do want to kind of dive deep into that start up
phase that you had. Because from my perspective, I
know myself, I'm very stubborn. That's always what I tell
people. It's it's an asset.
But it's definitely also a flaw in so far that when I start
something and I have a feeling that 100% this is the right
thing, this is the right idea, it is going to be so hard if
that reality says no, because then I'm going to really try and
give it my all to make it succeed.
But at the end, if it's really a no, then you have to realize and
be able to let go. And you, I think you must have
gone through something similar right together with that
colleague or that friend that you started up with.
What was the realization that what you created was actually
not gonna be successful or not succeeding, and that you had to
let go in the end? So the company we started was we
wanted to create a sort of website builder for musicians
and the idea was that, well, we would have a website builder and
then you could have fans. That would pay a certain monthly
amount and they would get access to a limited area of the website
where you could post, you know, custom content for them.
I don't know what kind of toothbrush you use or, you know,
personal stuff that fans like to hear about their favorite
artists. OK, so that was the idea.
But we did, I think, a lot of things wrong when we were kind
of building that product. The first thing was that we were
actually already building the entire product without even
having talked to a single potential user.
So we thought that we knew what people wanted.
It's like the classic mistake if you start a company.
So I also went through that. So and because we were both
computer scientists, we were very, both very product driven.
So we spent I think 80% of our time, 90% of our time talking
about features and technical stuff and building stuff.
And you know, that's what we were doing all day without
really talking to users. Like, hey, do you actually want
a website built like this or maybe talk with fans?
Like would you actually be willing to pay a musician and
get access to this area of the website?
So I think that was for us like the first big mistake that we
made. A second mistake was that we
technically speaking didn't do a very good job of building the
product. It's it's also a trait of, I
feel, many computer scientists that you have the yeah, how do I
say it? Yeah, maybe a tendency.
Yeah that. So let's say a trait of computer
scientists often is that you have a tendency to want to build
everything from scratch yourself, because you just like
technology and hacking and. It's a fun challenge.
It's fun. So you just build everything
from scratch. But that also means that it's
going to take a long time and you're not going to be
benefiting from insights that other people had when they were
building parts of that system already.
And that means you just move very slow, you make lots of
mistakes. It's going to take a long time
and that's problematic. Yeah, that's the road.
So, yeah, exactly. But but so the system we built
was actually really complex and also I think we, we didn't
really understand some of the technical implications of how
you actually set up a web-based system like that.
So I mean there's more than just code, right?
There's also deployment and where you host it and
everything. Yeah.
So for us, we spent a lot of time on that and we built a
system that was actually not very good, OK?
And then we had the brilliant idea of then also using that
system for our own website because we thought, well, we're
building a website builder, so we should host our own website
using our own website builder. Which technically makes sense.
Great idea. Yeah.
But it also means that all the bugs and the problems and
everything that's now also on your website.
Oh yeah, so this self hosting idea, you know, it's also with
some programming languages half that where like Rust is built In
Rust for example, I think you can do that, but you you can't
do that immediately. You have to start with something
that works. If something mature.
Yeah. And then if your own thing is
mature, then you make the swap. So I think that was the 2nd
issue. So our website was actually not
that great because of because of that choice and so so we had, we
had built a product, we spent like a ton of time on building
it and and we noticed it wasn't really taking off because well
we didn't talk with a lot of users before.
So at that point we, you know you start to run off money and
you have to think, OK, is this actually something that we're
going to continue working on and that's when you have to make a
decision and either stop or make a pivot.
So that's what we reached, I think, 1 1/2 years into the
process. Well, 1 1/2 years into the
process and did you decide to say make a complete switch or
did you try and pivot or what? What was your decision there?
Yeah. So we still wanted to develop a
sort of product like this. So we decided to pivot, OK, And
instead of focusing on pop rock musicians, which is what we
mainly did until then, we shifted our focus on choirs and
singing groups. OK.
My Mark, who I was around the company with his his wife was
singing in the choir and he had a lot of connections there.
So we thought, hey, that might be a good start.
And we also talked then more with choir.
So we realized, oh, we maybe should talk with these people
and understand what they actually need.
So then we made a switch where we went from a website builder,
which we realized is a lot of work to do, right?
And there are already ton of website bills out there to a
sort of LinkedIn for choirs. So it was a website where you
could have your profile as a choir, you could put your
concerts there, if you were looking for new singers, you
could post a message, things like this.
And we had a ticketing system, so you could basically buy
tickets and pay them online, which most choirs didn't have at
the time. So that was the idea.
And we also made a big change technically where we realised,
OK, we can't build everything from scratch, so we have to use
existing libraries more and we have to make sure that we build
the least ourselves, because every time you build your own
thing, you also need right test for it.
There's going to be bugs, there's going to be problems.
So if you limit that, you have a better chance of survival.
So technically speaking, that's second round, that's second
platform. We did a lot better.
I can see that, yeah, yeah, but. Still, it didn't work.
That's fair, yeah. But I think that had something
that was. There were other factors as
well. One is that it was COVID, so all
the choir concerts were cancelled.
Basically so there's nothing. No tickets, there's nothing.
And we also realized that a lot of choirs, they actually liked
door to door selling because they're very local communities
and so they want to just, you know, ring the doorbell and talk
with somebody and then not sell it online.
Yeah, not digital components. So there was no yeah or hang
like a little notes at the supermarket and then if you're
looking for somebody. So it's very local and that
makes it harder for a platform like this to survive.
There's such a like, only learning that you would find out
when you actually talk to people and they figure out, OK, these
these are actually local communities, right?
And you talk to each other and people know each other and
that's how they find each other rather than going online
somewhere and booking like a ticket or something like that.
That's fun, yeah. Yeah.
So I think technically speaking we did a lot better with that
platform, but we still made the mistake of building it before
actually truly understanding what the problem is that we're
trying to solve because this is something we could probably have
discovered way sooner before we were actually spending any time
developing the thing. So we did better, but I think
there was still, you know, areas where we didn't do as good of a
job. Yeah, I mean it, it really
reflects this whole path. It really reflects kind of the
learnings you've had, which is so cool to have.
Because coming out of, let's say, university or even your
educational career, you think the world works in a certain
way. And then you start an
organization and then you think, OK, the world works in this way,
but it's also within that organization.
So I feel like the more you put yourself out there, the more
different perspectives you get, the better you understand of the
trade-offs because there's no silver lining, there's no golden
path. Otherwise everyone would start a
company, they would just figure out how to do so.
But it's so context dependent. It depends on your domain, your
problem space, your user. And even when you figure all
that out, you have the thing of right time, right place, right.
You might have the best product with the the customers.
You really understand the problem.
You're building the solution and the COVID happens and everything
shuts down for a year and a half and you you might be like, well,
either pivot or yeah, it's it's really hard to do this.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm, I'm now reading a book I
find very interesting. It's called The Black Swan by
Nassim Taleb. Don't know if you've read that,
but. It's recommended to me.
Yeah, it's it's really cool. But it it stresses that like
most things that are happening in the world, they they're not
under a Gaussian bell curve. You know it's that's not how the
world works. And most of the things that that
happen are actually controlled by these kind of really weird
events that are incredibly hard to predict.
So you can make predictions for the next year or the next two
years, but it's probably not going to come through because
there's there's no way you can predict all these very well in
fundamentally unpredictable things.
So, and I feel like if you start a company, you're very much in
the middle of that because you take decisions everyday about
what you're going to do, what your strategy is going to be and
these unpredictable things happen and you need to adjust
and the the challenges like doing it in such a way that the
predictions that you make, you don't overestimates your own
precision and you always built in, yeah, some leeway.
And assuming that, OK, this is a prediction, it's probably not
going to happen, but we need something in order to take
decisions. Yeah, that's the hard part
because I mean, if you make a decision, you're biased towards
thinking that decision is the right one, right?
And to some degree you have to believe, if we're talking about
a vision, if no one believes the vision, then what's the vision
for, basically? And a vision is super powerful
if people believe in it, but then if it turns out to be
wrong, you have to be flexible enough to let that go.
Like, I feel like it's a big cross coming from my side
because I've never experienced that.
But I I would like to experience that just because of having
talked to many people, you yourself included on the show
and off the show about their experiences and it seems like
exactly as you say, it's a real good process for learning as
well. You learn the fastest probably,
if you own all the mistakes and if you're in control.
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I can highly recommend it. And I mean, the stupid thing is
like the fear of not doing it comes from not having job
security. But the question is whether you
should really be that concerned about it in if if you live in a
Western country or a country where at least you know the
economy is going well, there is. There are often at least some
level of protection mechanisms. I mean, you're most probably not
going to run out of food and die of hunger and thirst, right?
And a lot of the fears are based on that very biological thing of
Oh my goodness, I I won't have a home anymore, I won't have food.
I. Yeah, I need to survive.
Yeah, it's it's survival instinct.
But it's it makes sense if you're a hunter gatherer and
yeah, of course you need to survive and.
But in our current world, it actually doesn't serve us at all
to have that intuition. Yeah.
And it means you need to work to get out of that.
Yeah, I can see that. I can see that.
I wonder if that's holding me back.
And it's also probably comfort and risk.
It's a lot of factors, yeah. But it could be that that's the
factor that's holding me back cuz job security and let's say
the same quality of life that that is I think what's holding
me back, letting go of that or or it's not really a decision to
let go of that, but it's a risk and if you're risk averse, you
will not take that risk or you'll postpone it, I feel like.
Yeah. I mean in the end if you look at
a company as a profit making machine, it's way more than
that. But if you just look at it from
profit making machine kind of perspective, then you can't make
profit if you don't take risk. That's true.
You need to take some level of risk, yeah.
And you need to be and you need to be OK with that.
Yeah, yeah. And as yeah, it's going to take
a long time sometimes or even getting used to I guess.
But now we've we've gone through let's say your entrepreneurial
journey and I know it, that's not where it ends because right
now you step back into that more so educational role.
I would say educating others with just by virtue of content
creation, which I think is a is a really cool and fascinating
model. I think we need that.
I think people are looking for quality content, but you didn't
really. Did you start with that in mind?
That that this is a problem that you could solve?
Or how'd you get into the content creation space?
So what actually happened is that this pivot to the choir
platform didn't really work well.
I mean, in a sense the platform did well, but it was very hard
to sustain a company based on that.
So I decided OK, I should reduce costs so I'm going to do
teaching part time again. So I went back to the university
and I did teaching only. So I just I taught several
bachelor level courses again which for me was totally fine
because I enjoyed teaching was so was no problem.
And at the time we we had a software design course and we
noticed that Python was really gained a lot of popularity.
So there was a version of this software design course for the
regular computer science students and the information
science students and the information science students.
For them having a Python version of this course would be very
helpful because they will typically you know do data
science or write smaller automation scripts or do those
things that are more closely related to business processes.
So we decided to change that course from I think it was C# to
Python And that's what I did. So I modified the entire
structure and made Python examples.
But while I was doing that I looked online for, you know,
examples for design patterns and things like this and I noticed
there was very little information available.
Actually it was mostly very beginner focused.
So learn Python in, I don't know, three hours the basics of
Python or it was very recipe based.
How do you do this very specific thing step by step and at the
same time you notice that people have trouble with writing more
complicated scripts, Because even if you just you write a
simple Python script, things can get complex.
Pretty soon you know you have libraries like numpy and or.
If you do machine learning and use different models, you need
to modify the data and everything so it's it can get
quite complex. If you introduce that level of
complexity in your scripts, you need to think a bit how you're
going to structure it, how you're going to design it, and
there was very little content out there.
So I try to structure the course more around this.
And of course because I had all these failures with all these
different platforms. What was very interesting is
that I actually developed a sort of 6th sense of basically always
having the assumption that OK, this is going to fail anyway.
So how can I write the code in such a way so that I can most
effectively throw it in the trash and then pivot to
something else? Which in the end, when you think
about this, actually what software design's all about,
right? You want to decouple things so
you can easily replace stuff or make functions, classes really
small so that you can easily work on them and so the the
whole ideas of software design that I learned from building
these platforms, I could more or less directly translate into the
content for the course. Beautiful.
So that's how I started. And I so I created because it
was COVID time. We did that all online.
I created videos for that, which I posted on YouTube because,
well, that was like the easiest platform to use for posting
video content. Yeah.
And then I realized, like, hey, I actually like doing this.
This is actually fun. And there's so much you can do
with video that's that's, you know, overlays and animations
and transitions. And so I really thought, OK,
this is cool, I'm gonna experiment with this.
And so that's kind of how it all started.
So then I started. I bought a camera.
It wasn't even necessary, but you know, it makes it more fun
to actually have a good camera. So I bought the camera and then
I started posting videos basically about that same topic,
taking things that I learned from my previous start-ups and
applying them to Python And posting videos about it.
So that's how the channel started.
I like that. And initially, yeah, of course
you get like, I don't know, 5 views or something on the video.
But then I saw there was a Reddit community on Python,
which was quite big. So I started posting my videos
there. And then also initially you get
like lots of criticism, like, why is this a video?
Who is this guy? Who are you?
You are nobody. And I I don't watch videos, I
only want to read blog posts. So yeah, you kind of have to go
through that I guess. But then at some point, a few
months in, so every week, I basically did the video posted
on Reddit, got all the crap over me.
But then at some point, there was one video where I was
covering. I think it was one of the design
patterns. And that one actually, yeah,
went viral on Reddit and was at the top of the Python subreddit
for like a week or something. And people were discussing about
it. And suddenly I had like over
1000 subscribers, and that's really when the channel started
to take off. That's awesome, Yeah.
I I like that you said that you you had kind of a touch and go
based approach on this. You even said I wanted to
experiment with this, right? See if I first of all enjoy it
and see if it also gains traction.
And from the educational perspective, YouTube is
phenomenal, right? Because at you physically
there's only such a skill you can educate people with just by
having this kind of physical presence that is needed.
Plus videos allows you to edit the content to then streamline
the whole process and make it I would say not perfect but near
perfect where it would actually land and when you would have
let's say that quarter dropping in people's heads more and more
often and people even have the replayability, right, because if
you educate people in person. I've, I've gone to university
it's three years now. I don't have a single video that
I can fall back on and beat that caught.
This is where I learned that and so and so or let me let me
refresh my memory here and there.
YouTube allows for all of that. And the fact that the kind of
Reddit community also embraced a a new stream of education, I
think it's phenomenal because just like with the choir
examples, physical communities are there, but digital
communities are even more so prevalent now.
And especially in software, right.
People are always trying to Google and always trying to
educate themselves, whether they're in university or whether
they're in an organization. Their educational journey never
really stops when you're kind of in tech in this digital space
adjacent to creating software. So then that that education is
always going to be valuable there, I feel like.
Yeah, and especially if you think about how you learn
nowadays, at least in my case, it's, you know, you go on
YouTube or you you look it up and and Google something and
then you find a blog post about that's how you learn.
And the whole idea of that you have to be physically present
somewhere to learn something. Yeah, it's not how people learn
anymore. And to me, that also makes
YouTube such a great place to be part of, you know, because,
yeah, you have the whole video aspect of it.
There's also the community of people.
And YouTube's algorithm actively pushes your content so that it
finds people who you can help. Yeah.
And I think that's like a really cool thing.
Yeah, yeah, I see that. When we talked about ego, let's
say earlier, you also mentioned that with YouTube, you have to
really work on not letting everything go to your head.
And I recognize that 100%. One of the first things I
thought about was, OK, YouTube only gets monetized.
If you have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time that is
like the and I'm on a lot of new YouTube subreddits that is like
the the milestone that people have and I me too.
I would be like we're almost there, Roma.
And then you would hit 1000 subscribers.
For me, it was the subscribers before the watch time and I'd be
like now it's the watch time and it would be something I always
kind of looked at. And then when it was achieved, I
did kind of feel that void because I was like what now?
And then I had to learn to just let go and have fun making
videos. But that was the whole process
for me. Did you go kind of a similar
experience there? Yeah, it's very recognizable.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I think like subscribers and likes and things like that,
they're very well, likes, maybe less so.
But subscribers for sure, they're fantasy metrics.
It's it doesn't really save that much and in the beginning I was
everyday like looking at YouTube analytics and looking at the
views and the subscribers and it's very interesting but also
you realize OK I I also have to just get on with doing content
you. Have to do stuff.
Yeah. I mean it's insightful in the
sense these analytics in that they help you understand better
what an audience likes and what they maybe like less.
But in the end, it's still you who has to do the content.
It's you know, you can't fake your way out of that.
So I I find a comment section in YouTube way more helpful than
the analytic section. Yeah, yeah, me too.
That is it. But still that has high highs
let's say and also low lows. If someone says who is this guy,
What's he talking about? I'm like damn.
Yeah, yeah. Actually, I approach it
differently nowadays. I noticed that whenever some
video of mine gets pushed by the algorithm, I get more negative
comments because it reaches a new audience.
So I'm always happy when I see lots of critical comments that
bash my videos, because I'm like, oh, so I'm, I'm reaching
new people. That's.
Great. That's a good insight.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I'm actually happy when I see negative, yeah.
It's I like. I like how you twisted it.
That makes sense. We had a short go viral and
there was this colleague of mine that basically said every
programmer thinks they're the best program in the world.
Now even in that clip, I was like, Are you sure about that?
Because I'm imposed to say blah blah blah.
And he was, he doubled down and he was explaining that whenever
you think you're right from a programming standpoint, you
really think you're right. And then you butt heads with
people. And that's kind of the
stubbornness that people have kind of have to have and also
have to let go of. And he says if you didn't
realize you're wrong, that was the point he was trying to make.
Then all of that ego comes crumbling down.
That was the point. And then people just fixated on
the no having impulsive syndrome.
Everyone I know hasn't the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Who is this guy? You're missing the point.
But yeah, it was because of kind of that virality that more
people saw it. So that was a funny, funny
little bit. Roth and I always laugh about
it. Yeah, but like with probably I
started the podcast and I had a colleague that I did it with.
But at some point you run it as kind of a one man show, right?
From your standpoint also probably the editing, the video
recording, figuring out, doing the research and then making it
happen. Even the posting was all you.
And now I've learned that you actually have a team that helps
you with that, an editor even. When did you, let's say, find
people to help you along this journey?
Yeah, so indeed, I started doing everything on my own, including
the editing and everything. I mean, you have to, right?
Nobody else is going to do it for you, so you have no choice.
But once I start getting some traction, that was after the
first video went viral on Reddit.
That was also around the time that I was monetizing my
channel. So of course it doesn't bring in
like tons of money, but what I could do at that point was get
an editor and basically hand off the editing work, because I
really noticed that in particular the editing, though I
liked it was fun. It also took a lot of time.
And so for me that was like the most important thing to hand off
first, so to speak. And by doing that, I created the
time for myself to do things that were let's say a bit more
long term strategic. So one thing I noticed in those
months that my video started to take off is that a lot of people
ask me like hey, can you do a more, you know, in depth course
or program because I wanna learn more about this stuff.
And so I thought, yeah, I could, I could do that.
And I was looking into like on my course platform.
So we have some of these platforms that host everything,
like Udemy or Coursera. Coursera, exactly.
But you can also host it yourself using, I don't know,
teachable kajabi. There's a couple of these
platforms out there. And so I had to.
I thought, OK, I could do that. I could create a course and then
I don't know, I have to figure out how to host it.
But in order to create the space for me to do that, I couldn't
continue doing these videos and editing and everything because
at the same time I was still, you know, I was doing part time
teaching and I was working on a new idea with my colleague.
So I had to create time for myself to actually to be able to
create an online course. And that's when I handed off the
editing work. So that was like the very first
step. So basically I took the money
that I made from advertising and some sponsorships.
I did very little sponsorships at that time.
I could basically pay the editor for that.
Perfect. Yeah.
And and that's kind of how that started.
So then I think that was, yeah, so that when that happened, the
monetization handing off editing work, that was somewhere in
June, I think 2021, if I'm remembering that correctly.
It's been a while. And it gave me time to then
develop a course on software design.
So that's what I did. I created the software designer
mindset and I launched that in December of that same year.
Yeah, and that's when it really took off.
Yeah, you can see that, Yeah. For me, the I've gone kind of
throughout the same path, also having the responsibilities of
editing, finding people, recording.
Obviously the robot always helped me, but before I got him
in to edit the episodes, I was doing it all by myself.
And then to offload that and have someone else do it for me,
that was like, OK, I know this process by heart.
It it took a while and a little bit of friction to get used to
someone else having, let's say skin in the game and doing that
as well. And a lot of learning and also
being able to let go and be like, OK, someone else is doing
that now, I don't have to jump in.
Did you have that same experience?
Because this is kind of you built it up from scratch and
then someone else comes in and also helps you do that, but it
takes a while if you like. Yeah, I mean, you have a very
particular idea of how you want things to look and how you want
things to be. So it took me quite some time to
find the right fit for me, actually.
So I worked with a few editors in the beginning and, well, you
know, they did the job, but it wasn't really in terms of style
what I was looking for. So in the end, I I ended up with
someone that I really, I'm very happy with who work really well
together. And he also kind of intuitively
understands now how to edit the videos.
And that's just so incredibly valuable.
Yeah, that's the best. But it's a process for sure.
Yeah, when the, let's say the experience with the previous
editors delivered a video to you, would you still then
publish it even though you were like I maybe would have done
something different or the look and feel you would have not
really agreed with here and there?
Well, I mean what we typically do is that we'd have more back
and forths, so more changes and more things to be fixed or I
would sometimes do still somewhere myself because I felt
like OK, I wanted to be like this so.
It's recognizable. Yeah, yeah.
If you're a control freak, then that's what you do basically.
But yeah, so in the end, that's how I still end up publishing
most of these videos. And I mean also frankly
speaking, like if you do screencast about software
development, you know it's not that important that everything
is flashy and animated, then whatever.
As long as the code is easy to read and the explanation works,
then most people think it's OK. So I think the bar is not as
high, which is also why I managed to do it myself in the
beginning. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah. I mean, I saw, I, I told you
before the show, I saw the latest few videos.
The editing. I I love the editing.
Maybe it's my eye, Raul's eye. Oh, we looked at it and we were
like, this. This is legit.
Thank you. Yeah, I I also really like how
we progressed and learned so many things about how to do
YouTube videos. And yeah, that's definitely has
changed a lot and how we work. Yeah, it's always going to be a
learning journey. Yeah.
One of the things I one of my last thoughts I still had was
your explanation of kind of your entrepreneurial journey.
You really took those learnings with you and you applied them
even in your educational journey afterwards, let's say when you
saw. OK.
Just by virtue of having created this complex system which didn't
really work, you set up your software in a different way,
right? Decoupled and smaller.
So you can interchange and adapt and you take things off the
shelf so you don't have to build everything yourself, right?
Those are learnings of total cost of ownership and those are
all experience based. I feel like you can.
You can listen to people or read a book and have the theory, but
some stuff just really lands when you have that experience.
Now that you've gone back to, let's say, the educational side
where you're educating others, do you have this feeling that
you might lose touch of what it takes to kind of create great
software because you need experience to also be able to
educate, I feel like. Yeah, we're very aware of that.
And I find it really important to avoid me becoming just the
person to talk about software without actually coding myself.
Yeah. So what we're always trying to
do is find this really nice cycle of content and
development, because actually what's nice about doing YouTube
content or online courses is that you also need all sorts of
tools, right? So we now have in our team
somebody that's basically full time working on automation, just
connecting platforms because you end up using so many platforms.
We use obviously YouTube, but also LinkedIn, Twitter X,
Facebook, Instagram, the accounting tool that we use.
We have a payment provider. We have notion which we use for
all our internal processes and documents.
We used to for adding captions to YouTube and that's like half
of it. So we use like 20-30 different
tools that all need to be connected and you need to write
software in order to do that. And Python is a great way of
doing that. So we write a lot of Python code
ourself and then we can also create content about that
experience. Yeah, Beautiful.
Yeah. So that really works.
And a second thing that we're doing is that we're developing a
platform called Learn Tail, which is an AI tool that you can
put, It's a website, you can paste a link to another website
there or YouTube video or just some text and can create
learning content for you using AI.
And that's also something that we're building sort of for the
audience, like, hey, if you watch, you can just watch my
YouTube video, but then you can also do a quiz about it and it's
generated automatically. But by building that you also
learn again a lot about building software as a service platforms
and you can do content about that.
Now recently I've been looking more into the Rust programming
language, which is really more a systems low level language,
which I also find very interesting.
So I'm now creating a tool that we can use for video production
that like moves around Final Cut profiles and sets the
directories correctly. And we can share like a project
with my video editor who's in Hungary, Fiat did report Story.
So now we're building a command line tool for that and we can do
content about that. So we always try to think of,
OK, so we're building these tools and these things and we're
learning things from that. And we always want to also
create content about what we learned.
And that's like the cycle that we try to optimize.
Yeah, I think that's the that's the best, right?
It's not just research and education.
With software. You need that practical
experience. Just by having found kind of
things within your own process or ideas you want to execute on.
Trying that out, having the room to do so and learning from those
and then sharing them. That's a great circle to then be
part of. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and and a lot of doing. Content means that you're also
forced to not make the mistake of building a ton of stuff that
you know nobody wants. In parts we're building the
things that we need internally, so that's it's definitely solves
a need. But also at the same time,
because you get so much feedback on on the videos that you
produce that you can also use that feedback to know what you
need to create next. Yeah, so we have this whole
system in place now where we basically people can comment on
my videos like hey, can I do a video about, I don't know,
Streamlit or any other Python app or anything else.
What we now built is an automation that uses AI to
classify the comments. And if somebody asked for a
video, we then create a card in Notion with our video
suggestions using an API call and then so we collect a lot of
feedback automatically from our audience that way and then that
basically determines what we're going to do videos about.
That's genius. Yeah, that's really cool.
Like community driven video content ideas?
Absolutely. Yeah.
Because I feel like if it if it
were to all come from your side, it would be a lot.
And sometimes you might feel burnt out or video ideas or you
might be like, oh, I don't really want to do this, but I
have to. But now that it's a community
and you know people want this, that is such a good motivator
also to then create them, I think that's genius.
Yeah, I mean, you still, like, have to also address your
creative side, of course. Sometimes I'm just like, hey, I
want to do a video about that. Let's do it.
Let's do it right? So I don't always listen to my
audience, but I try to at least roughly follow what I see people
are asking for. Yeah.
And I think that's also a big part of why do YouTube channel
works. We just try to do videos that
you actually want. It's the community.
Yeah. It's the whole community aspect.
Yeah. I've really enjoyed this
conversation. Arian, thank you so much for
coming on and sharing all the high highs and the low lows,
even the learnings involved. I really appreciate it.
It was such a pleasure being. It was really great and yeah,
lovely. Awesome.
Then I'm going to round it off. Thank you so much for listening.
I'm going to put all Ariana's socials and as YouTube channel
in the comments below, check them out, let them know you came
from our show. And with that being said, we'll
see you on the next one beyond coding.