Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Akil and if you're interested in
productivity and learning through content creation, this
episode is for you Joining me today, my friend and colleague
Rafael De Leo. I love his stories.
I'll put all his socials in the description below, check them
out. And with that being said, enjoy
the episode. Walk me through kind of your
your own process then because you've been making videos for
has it been a year? Has it been longer than a year?
I've been making videos for three years now.
Three years as I started and I think August of 2020, Yeah,
somewhere around 2020, yes, same YouTube channel.
Same YouTube channel. Perhaps a mistake.
Why? Yes, because I I think I told
you that before, but I started my YouTube channel talking about
life in Portugal towards Brazilian people.
Yeah, right. And and then at some point I
switch it into talking about technology.
And the channel started in Portuguese to a niche, and I
switched to English into a completely different niche,
right? So I already had an audience
built in that Channel. And then I started talking about
something else, and the channel wasn't pure anymore, you see?
So YouTube was recommended my technology videos to people who
didn't speak English, or maybe didn't speak English, and who
weren't actually interested in that topic, Right?
So I. I I found out recently that
that's not something good to do with an YouTube channel, you
know, But I mean, it's not good for the transition period, but
at some point you've transitioned, right?
YouTube now knows OK, this is your audience and it recommends
you to the right people then. Yeah, yeah, that.
That's what I hope and no one knows though.
Yeah, exactly. A lot of people say a lot of
different things, right, Of how to grow your channel and get to
more subscribers and more views. Yeah.
Yes. I've been in the process.
In the process of understanding that yeah, I don't think there's
a there's a final answer. I deleted because I was making
short clips because I saw everyone that did a podcast had
like a either a separate channel or on the same channel they will
post clips of the podcast episode like good fragments, not
shorts because shorts were not there yet.
And I started posting these and they did well.
Then I read that YouTube doesn't like it when you have shorter
amount length videos and the longer length videos.
And I was like, that's exactly what I have.
Well shit. So then I deleted all the
shorter length videos and I'm like okay.
Well fine, we'll just go with a podcast only channel.
And then shorts came out and I'm kind of doing shorts still, so I
don't know what works. That's interesting because I
also realized that easily podcast channels, they also have
like a side channel only for shorter videos, right?
So perhaps that's the reason I also thought so, and because I
believe that is why I deleted all the short channels.
Got it. Makes sense.
And initially, even before we started this channel, I was
like, should we have a separate channel for all the little
clips? And then Martin, the guy I
started it with, he was like, Nah, it's not worth it and blah
blah, blah, Why would we do a separate channel?
And I was like, but I did the research, but like, I can't
prove anything. It's just it's my thoughts,
right? And no one's gonna tell you, OK,
this is right or wrong, It's just whatever you think is best
based on what other people are doing.
It's very strange. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That that. That's funny, right?
That's the thing about advice. And I mean everybody's got a an
advice, right. And I think I think it's
dangerous, right? If I if I come to you for
example and say you shouldn't do that on your channel and I'm not
100% sure of what I'm saying, this is dangerous because it may
be leading you into the wrong direction, right.
And recently I started a a channel about Stoicism as I as I
told you before. And my mom and I've been posting
every day, right? And my mom come recently to me
and said, hey, you shouldn't post every day, should post most
a week so people can miss it and come back.
And that was like, yeah, but you're you're saying that based
on what? Yeah.
And she said, oh, based on marketing courses that I did
online. And I was like, OK, OK.
But you see, she she, she can't be 100% sure about that.
That's her feeling, right. And her intuition.
But it may be dangerous. If you're for telling somebody
that and you're leading the person towards the wrong
direction, yeah, Even though you have a good intention, right?
If you give advice to someone, do you do it like that?
Like it's absolute, like it's black and white?
Because I don't and I very consciously do it because I
don't want to be wrong. So whenever I am not sure, I say
I think this is so and so and then people like, OK, this is
what he thinks. Well, whatever.
I never say OK, this is how it is.
Because if I'm not sure, I don't want to come across as if it's
100% for other people then to interpret and be like no, I did
this, you were wrong, blah blah blah, these consequences.
So I always am very conscious with what I say and when, it's
just what I think is the truth. And if you then think the same
thing, fine, If you don't, fine as well.
It's my opinion, basically. Yeah, no, I totally, I totally
agree with you. And I think I even take a step
further that is, I doubt myself seeing what I believe in.
Sometimes you're in a situation that you're like, there is
somebody. Doing something wrong for me,
right or towards me. And then I stopped for a second
and I think, Is that true? What I believe to be true is
true. Is this the reality?
Or is this my interpretation of the reality you see and I try to
take evidence from? The thing air right to
understand if if that's actually true or not.
And I talk and I talk to people that I trust, like my wife for
example. I talk to her about the
situation so I can understand it better and understand if what
I'm actually believing to be true is true.
You see, before I take any actions on to solve the
situation or just to to make it better, you see, I think that's
really good because it, first of all, it probably grounds you and
you're not judgmental, right? I some of my friends do this
when they see something and they say that's weird and I'm like,
why is it weird, right? That's just your opinion.
Why do you label it as something that is odd just because you
think that is so right? You're not in their context, you
don't know what they've been through or what is happening
right now, why they're behaving the way they are.
And I feel like, I mean, maybe that's not why I say that's
interesting way too much, but don't like it when people say
that's weird. I feel like just allow people to
do whatever they do, right? There's probably a reason why
they're doing it. If not, then that could be a
reason in and of themselves as well.
Yeah, yeah, it's different. Yeah, I totally agree.
And I think that whenever we're judging some something or
somebody, we're actually projecting ourselves into it,
right? Something that we don't like
sometimes about ourselves or we're afraid of or anything else
into it, right. Yeah, I think that's the that's
what happens. Yeah, it could be.
Yeah. I think that's interesting as
well. Walk me through when you
actually started this YouTube channel because you had the idea
you just want to talk to people or what was the idea there?
I I didn't want to start a YouTube channel.
Actually it was my brother's idea.
He he always came with ideas for us to make money.
Yeah, right. So when it started working, when
I started working because I'm, I'm younger than him and he said
hey, we should open a mini franchise you see.
So. You got to start working.
You're going to save this amount of money and then we're going to
take this amount of money and open the mini franchise.
And I thought, wow, that's nice, let's do it.
So I would have to work in the for two years and so I could
save that amount of money so I could open the mini franchise in
the shopping mall, for example, so we could make more money.
And it never happened. I started saving money on, but I
I never opened the mini franchise, right.
And the ideas would come. And then he started getting
interested in in buying stocks and then he talked me into it as
well. So.
It was around 2014 right and Brazil had just gone through a
political crisis at the time our president had just been featured
the that the stock market was was crashing and bonds president
bonds they were paying more because of the because of the
government's fragility and at this time you could buy these
bonds and and earn a lot of money and you could buy stocks
for example as well and almost any stock that it would buy.
If it didn't went bankrupt, so you got to just got to pick them
based on that. But but if they if they didn't
go bankrupt, they would come back eventually and you would
make money. So he started suggesting that I
did this and I started doing this and I started liking it,
you see. But The thing is I talked to
people and at the time I didn't have the mindset that I have
today and they would try to talk people into doing that as well
like oh you got to do it. This is the right thing to do.
You got to buy stocks and everything else.
And I think that some people that I knew at the time and that
I still know they they they believe that I'm like a stock
investor and I know what I'm doing.
But at the time it didn't. I was just lucky that that I
that I own border the stock market that had a really nice
period. Everything was very cheap and
and it went up basically naturally.
You see, the companies would recover eventually because it
was like more of a political crisis than the company healthy
itself. Yeah, yeah.
Did your brother get you into a lot of things?
Because this YouTube channel is one thing, stocks is a is
another thing. I think a brotherly influence
can do a lot of things. Yeah, yeah.
He's been my example for. Yeah, for a long time.
Yes, as I really admire him. And yes, we have our our
arguments, but yeah, and and disagreements, but.
He's he's been my my example for for a long time.
I like that a lot. I'm trying to.
I mean I wouldn't say I'm I'm that much of an influence.
But yeah, obviously I tell my little brothers a lot, my
siblings all the time. Yeah.
And then you suck with this YouTube channel and at some
point you decided to pivot, right, pivot into something
completely different. I mean you even switch
languages. Why?
Why the pivot there? Yeah.
So I I was selling, but I didn't get there, right.
And then? In 2020, my brother started
saying, hey, you know, you're living in Portugal because I was
living in Portugal at the time. There are a lot of Brazilian
people who are making channels on about their life abroad and
they're trending and you can make money out of that right, by
by talking and people visualizing your, your videos.
It's all right. That's an idea.
And at the time, he also said that he was going to start a
channel talking about investments and everything else.
And I thought, okay, let's do it right.
So I'm going to do it about Portugal going to do it about
investments. And I started my channel.
He never started. He's one of those brothers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but. But he started talking about it
like online and Instagram and other places.
But I I started talking about Portugal, right?
But it was kind of his idea, actually.
So I started talking about how I got my first job in Portugal,
how I got my first tech job in Portugal.
I started interviewing my former boss and it was just when COVID
hit. So I was interviewing, asking
how the market was for Brazilian people who wanted to emigrate
from Brazil to Portugal and. If they should do that now or if
they shouldn't. And I did other two videos and
those other two videos, they were in the list format which
work very well on YouTube. So the first one was 10
differences between the traffic like car traffic and Portugal
and Brazil, and 10 and five things why I love living in
Portugal and those two. Blew up, they they blew up,
yeah. So I got 5000 views like one
month for the first one and 10,000 views for the other.
Good stuff. Good stuff, yes.
And then I realized, shit, I don't want to do it.
No, Yeah, it's that one when I actually blew up.
Yeah. Not, not, not because it blew
up, but I realized that I wasn't doing for myself.
You see, I didn't really want to talk about it.
I was just trying to surf a wave and yeah, profit on that
basically. And but I realized that that
wasn't what I wanted to talk about.
That's. It wasn't the legacy that I
wanted to leave to the world. Yeah, you see, And that's when I
said I got to switch it to something else.
I'm going to start making videos about technology and what I'm
working with physically because at this point it was already
2021. I had like a hiatus from my from
my channel. I didn't post that much and but
I was posting a medium because I also have a medium page and.
I was posting articles about things that I worked with, so I
was working with the elastic search for example.
I had to deploy it on Kubernetes and there weren't many articles
explaining how to do that online right?
So I wrote my own article and they went pretty well to see how
to deploy log stash and Kubernetes as well like this one
got I think 90,000 views already.
And paid me more than $120.00. Just this article.
Yes. And this is not just good, this
is motivational, right? Yeah, yeah.
It motivated me to keep doing that.
And then I kept, I kept writing on on Medium and I I try to
write like every month, sometimes twice a month about
things that I was working with. See.
Of course, nothing confidential about the company, but like the
technology, how to get started, how to do it.
I had a problem. I had to.
You know dynamic schedulers, for example, in Spring Boot.
How can I do it? Yeah, I couldn't find anything
online. I had to figure it out myself.
OK, other people are going to be looking for that as well, right?
So I'm going to write about it and let them find out.
And they do, yeah, yeah, good stuff, man.
Do you like? Because user channel is
different than writing content, right?
Do you like one more than the other, or do you like it all?
That's a tough question. Yeah.
You see because. I like writing articles more
than making videos, and I will emphasize that writing, then
making right the process is easier.
When you're writing right, you get the time, You type it, you
you press the backspace, you delete it, you review it several
times. You don't have to memorize
anything. You just you're writing there,
right? That's fine.
And you're making videos. It takes time.
As you do a shot, you do 234. And you see you're you're trying
to record for 10 hours. Sometimes you see at the
beginning, at least now I take like sometimes two or three
hours and sometimes even less. But it takes time.
You see and you're editing after and you're like, I didn't really
like that part. I'm like, but I'm not going to
record that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, so that part I prefer like writing.
But on the other hand, I think that the rewards from the videos
are. Are bigger.
OK. See that the audience that grows
around it, the way people see you as I think that that's
completely different. I never thought of that, that
the audience side of things and kind of the the exposure and the
feedback you get is different because that there's not, are
there comments? There's still comments on like
Medium blog posts and stuff like that, no, but they, I don't
think the audience is as engaging in like your next
article or something. Yeah man, that's was something
that was reflecting about recently because in media we
have claps that are like likes, you can follow the person, you
can subscribe to their channel, you can use the referral code
code to become a member and they get part of the of your
membership that you pay and you have the comments section as
well. But man, people are so
miserable. What do you mean?
I mean that I get like 50,000 views in the post, right?
People go there. They benefit from it because
they're looking for a solution. They're looking for an answer.
They find their answer, but they don't clap.
They don't subscribe. They don't do anything.
You see, They just go there, get what they need and close the
tab. So if you're watching this and
you and you and you frequently open medium, don't forget to
clap and subscribe to people. Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. I I never do that.
I never clap. I never subscribe.
It's because if I'm in my, let's say I'm in a day-to-day right
and I need to figure out this problem.
I just want to get the information, get back to
whatever I was I was doing, right?
If you go out of it and if you're like who is this person,
what are they doing? Blah blah, blah, like you're out
of the problem you were trying to solve.
You get you need to retain that focus and otherwise you need to
recontextualize completely, which is going to take away from
time, right? Yeah, nowadays I barely even
Google because we have this Slack GPT plugin, the ChatGPT
plugin from our company. It's hilarious.
I just open up Slack. I'm like, I'm trying to do this
and convert this to hex and then I need to flip all this and this
is the output example. How do I do that?
And he just writes me the code. I'm like, yeah, get back to
don't need to go any Googling, don't need to click through
articles, no nothing. Yeah, yeah, so and with YouTube,
I'm in YouTube mode, right? I'm watching content.
I'm like video next video ah, what about is there more like
these? I'm all I'm consuming contents,
a different vibe, I feel like. So then I do like and subscribe
and yeah, not if they tell me, because I hate it when people
tell me. That's also why I stopped doing
it on this podcast. OK, I hate it when people tell
me so. So if people tell you to
subscribe or like it, you say no, I'm not going to do it just
because, you know, you told me to do it.
It's not a principal thing. I just, I'm like, I didn't need
to hear that. It's like I wasted my time.
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah.
But you know that I follow some people who are kind of experts
on making channels. They make a lot of money out of
channels. And some of them they say that
having a CTA actually increases the conversion rate of
subscribers and people. So yes, I think it also depends
on the niche. But I have a lot of friends who
tell me like hey, don't do it, don't ask people to do it.
And I I kind of stopped. I I just sometimes I reminder in
the beginning, at the OR the end, but that's it.
But I don't. I don't push, you see, and even
though I was talking about people like clapping or
subscribing or following you in this medium for example, but I I
don't mind if they don't, you see.
Or at least they didn't because right now, until then, I would
still get paid, right? So if you pay Medium and you
read my content, I get paid for the time that you spend reading
my content, right? So it doesn't matter if you
clapped or if you followed or anything like that, but Medium
is changing their monetization. Policies, OK.
In August, really saying now that the time people spend
reading our articles and and the number of claps and the number
of subscribers and number of comments are all going to
influence the monetization of your of your articles.
That's some bullshit. And now I'm like, damn, I'm in
in the niche that people don't do it.
Yeah, and sometimes like I have this article on that is.
Spinning up a Redis instance on docker, for example, see and the
article is nice. You can spin up your docker
instance, you can learn how to enable persistence, and you can
get really sorry your your Redis instance and you can get ready
with with Redis, right? You can get started with the
Redis, that's what I mean. And but most people, they just
want the docker command, yeah, So they open it, they get the
docker command and they go away. Yeah, few seconds.
Yes, few seconds. And as developers that's what we
do with most articles, right? You don't want to read the whole
content. You just want to get something
very specifically very quickly and get out of there.
You want to go back to your coding, right?
So I'm not really sure how this is going to work out now for
developers or people who write content for technology.
In that sense, in Medium, it's still going to be a nice
platform for month for monetization.
It's weird, right, Because the decision hurts the people that
create the content. And then you're like, OK,
probably meet and pay way too much and they're trying to
budget cut or whatever. So this is the new model, and
it's going to hurt. YouTube had that as well.
Like I've been on YouTube not making videos but consuming
content when it looked so ugly, when it had like the five great
star system instead of the thumbs ups, thumbs down, like it
looked like ass. And then also throughout that
I've heard content creators talk about YouTube changing their
monetization policy, blah blah blah blah.
I feel like medium's going through the same thing and
either they get better because of it because YouTube's still
around. The monetization is fine, I
think. I don't know exactly what
changed. Content creators are still
getting paid. There's still a lot of content
on there. It's bigger than ever, so I
don't know how medium's gonna fare in this way.
But yeah, for especially for the tech sector, just get in, get
whatever you need, and people are usually out.
Yeah, Substack's doing really well though, like tech
newsletters and stuff. I feel like that's up and
coming, which is really cool as well, that people consistently
put out content that people wanna consume on like a weekly
basis and people subscribe specifically for kind of all
round content. It's not necessarily to solve a
problem, it's more to gain a perspective and an
understanding, which I think is different.
Got it. But in which sense?
I mean, like understanding how an architecture is?
Yeah. Or more like news about like
these are the new features of this technology or this website
was hacked, That's how it happened.
It could be anything. I feel like like it could be OK
when when to use microservices or how Uber migrated from X to Y
to Z. The layoffs are happening now.
Here's a perspective of one of the people that are still there
or one of the people that got laid off.
Like it's more so about indeed decisions you would have to make
and not necessarily kind of how you solve problems.
This is more so kind of a paradigm or a perspective or a
mindset. Yeah, which different type of
content. I feel like if you're there,
like, OK, we're going to use Docker.
Like that's already a tool and we have to have these commands.
And this is how you spin this up.
This is really like a step by step on how to execute
something. And once people have that,
they're like, get got it done. If it doesn't work, articles
wrong. Next article.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
And this is more so like, I feel like more story in a different
way, in a different format, but taking people with them, telling
a story and then giving a certain sense of a take away
here and there, I feel like it's different.
People come back for that as well.
Yeah, yeah, I I've written both types, right?
So for the company I was working for before, I also wrote stories
of how we solved the problem. For example, monitoring problem,
observability problem for example.
And from what I realized is that this is you post it, you get
like a peek, right? People come, they read it and
they they disappear because they're not constantly searching
for that. Right, But if you have something
that is solving a problem, people are constantly searching
for that. Yeah.
So for example, this article that I have on how to deploy
logstash on kubernets. I posted it three years ago and
it still gets a lot of views. Yeah, yes, that's because people
are still, they still need to do it, right?
They still need to solve this problem.
They're constantly. Looking for it?
Yeah, yeah. Those people don't clap.
That's the thing. Man, those people don't clap.
Yeah. Yeah, you're listening to it,
right. Yeah, those those people don't
clap. But they don't.
They come, they come there for the problem.
That's it. They get the problem.
They go back to whatever they're doing.
And I'm one of them. Like, you're gonna keep looking
at the. I'm one of them as well, yeah.
Yeah, me too, actually. Yeah.
Yeah, we can help it.
I mean, we're working. We're like focused, as you said
we went to. To stay focused, you just want
to solve the problem as fast as possible, yeah?
And get back to YouTube, right? Yeah, absolutely.
How did you get so much into Redis?
Because I feel like I checked out YouTube channel.
A lot of it has to do with Redis.
Yeah, even the blog that you said was about Redis as well.
Yeah, it was kind of your intro there.
Yeah, so you see I hadn't I had never worked with Redis actually
OK, I have never worked with the Redis, OK actually.
And last year I had this colleague and he said hey.
It's going to be a conference in Barcelona, the Springdale
conference. I think we should go, let's talk
to our management team and ask them to sponsor us and then we
can go there and they said, all right, let's do it right.
And at the time the company I was working for, we were
struggling with data pipelines, right batch processing on taking
too long to process the the data.
And I went to this, to this conference with this colleague
and there was this stand there of Redis.
They were there. They were one of the sponsors.
During this year of the conference and I started talking
to them there, just like chatting, you see.
And then I started finding out about all the capabilities of
Redis that I didn't know until then.
And for me, Redis was just a cache.
And then I found out that it's much more than that.
You see it's a graph database, it's a pub sub kill, it's a
stream processor as well. It's a lot of things.
And it's an actual database that can be used as a primary
database, you see. And it's super fast as well.
That's what they said, right? So since it runs in memory, you
can run like millions of operations in one millisecond,
so it should be super fast as well.
And I said all right, this is perfect.
This could even. Perhaps solve our problems at
the company I'm working for right now.
And I got more interested in that.
And then there was the sales, the saleswoman there, and she
said, oh, you should watch the presentation of this guy, Brian
Simbaden. That's going to happen by the
end of the day. He's like the best.
And you should go there and watch.
It's all right. You're going to watch it, right?
And I I went there. I watched it and it blew my
mind, you see, because then he started saying everything that I
already already mentioned here. And he's the the person
responsible for maintaining and not maintaining but implementing
actually the Redis OM Spring library which is an extension of
Spring Redis Data that adds more functions and and capabilities
to Spring Data Redis. And his talk was about it right
and it blew my mind. I thought okay I should Start
learning about it, but at the same time I read a book.
By Austin Clay. I'm not sure if that's how you
pronounce his name called Show Your Work.
And in that book he basically talk, try, try to talk people
into sharing, showing their work.
You've seen a sense that you're building something, share some,
share a little thing every day you see.
And then he has many ways of doing that.
And one of the ways is. Share what you're learning as
well. So make it like a learning
journey. And I said okay, that's perfect.
I want to learn about Redis. I'm going to make it a learning
journey. And the reason why he says that.
And that's good. If you want to start like
sharing content, this is because you feel a lot of pressure,
right? You're going to start talking
about Spring Boot and you feel like, man, I don't know enough,
even though you may know a lot. You see you, you, you feel this
imposter syndrome and you're like.
And I shouldn't talk about it because I'm not 100% sure about
what I'm saying, right? And if you go through the
learning path, through the learning journey, you're
actually telling people, hey, I don't know anything about it,
I'm going to learn about it. This is my journey.
Come learn with me. And that's what I did with
Redis. Yeah, So I started to write from
the beginning. The first article that I wrote
was 10 Things You Didn't Know about Redis.
And I asked Brian to review it. I talked to him on Twitter and
and we started talking there, asked him to review it.
He he reviewed, he made a a couple of suggestions.
I applied the suggestions and they posted was nice and after
that I started learning other things as well.
So the first thing was Okay, how to run Redis on docker and then
how to get started with transactions, how to get started
with pub, sub and eventually. I I I mean, I kept creating
content. Yeah, you asked one question and
I I talked for no worries. I was thinking because if I
think about myself right, if I pick up a new technology I've
never used, I've never done anything with A to BS cloud,
right. I've talked a lot about Lambda.
I've guests on the talk and know a lot about that and I can
challenge questions and I can try to figure out and understand
and learn on the moment. But putting out content in my
learning journey, that's kind of a weird way of exposing
yourself. I feel like like I'm not nervous
of the podcast, right? I don't really care how people
perceive me on here. But my idea of me talking to a
camera trying to explain this thing, which I don't really
understand that well, that kind of frightens me.
It didn't frighten you in the beginning at all.
Not at all, actually. It was a relief really, see,
because I felt that way when it was talking about.
Things that I should know about or that I knew about.
Yeah, right. But then you're telling people,
hey, I don't know anything about it, It's like can be more clear.
Yes, exactly. Like follow on their own
responsibility. I don't take any responsibility
for that. That's basically what you're
saying, right. And sometimes you're going to
say something wrong. And I did, yeah.
So I I was talking about the rights transactions for example,
and I said something wrong and people came in the comments
section and they said hey, this is not right, this is not.
How it is? This is actually how it is.
Yeah, and I went there and deleted the comment.
No, this not on my watch. No, no, no, just kidding.
I went there and said, hey, thank you.
I'm gonna actually fix your, your comment on the top section
of the the comment section so people can actually learn from
that. And you thank the person because
this is actually aggregating to your learning journey.
Yeah, because I didn't know about it and now he told me
about it and now I know about it, right.
Yeah. So I learn faster.
I think so. I think so, yes.
For me, I mean for me at least you see because I I like to see
results, that's the thing. And then if I if I I'm doing a
course, it takes like 4 weeks and I'm just consuming,
consuming, consuming and not producing anything or producing
to myself like I'm I don't feel productive.
You see I got to put something out in the world, that's the
thing. And then if I put something out
in the world, I feel motivated to come back and learn more and
put something, more things into the world again.
Is that not how you learn? Like, has it kind of shifted
your learning paradigm when you pick up a new tool?
Would you write A blog post about it?
Would you make a video? Like, do you try and put stuff
out there to kind of accelerate that?
Completely. Completely.
Yeah, I was doing that actually. Now I'm trying to focus more on
the niche, right? So I was focusing on Redis and
now I my plan is to start focusing on coddling and flutter
the technologies that I'm very interested in so before.
I would do that. I I was working with the elastic
search. I was going to talk about it.
I was working with reddies. I was going to talk about it
right. Right now I'm going to talk
about one specific thing and try to create content about around
that and try to create an audience around around that.
Because sometimes like you're talking about reddies and then
some people follow you. You're growing an audience
around that. And then you start talking
about, I don't know, my sequel and then other people are going
to follow you. But then you you post a new a
new video about reddies, the people who are.
Who came to you from my sequel? They're actually not interested
in Redis, so they're not going to watch it.
Yeah. See.
So you're not growing an artist, you're just growing people
around you. Yeah, You see that?
That's my feeling. I'm not sure if that's right.
Interesting. I I think people also, and this
is probably why I'm saying also because people still find you
through Redis and they're like, OK, I get the video, I get the
content, that's it. And if you create a different
video, I don't really care about that.
But we'll still also follow you. I feel like if you might like,
shift kind of the paradigm there and talk about the problems that
you solve rather than the technologies that you use, the
problems that you solve will also kind of shine light on the
technologies that you use. But it's a different, it's a
different intro to what problem you're solving, right, or what
content people are getting. Which I think might help there,
because then you can keep the same audiences.
They're all interested in problem solving, and what tool
you're using can be either at the forefront or it can be just
part of the journey that you're kind of laying out for them.
Yeah, because you're always going to use new technologies.
It'd be sad to be like, OK, guys, goodbye to this audience,
hello to this audience, because I'm using a new technology.
Technology is always going to be evolving, basically.
So what? At the end of the day, what
stays constant is you. Yeah, it makes sense.
It makes sense and I think that works.
But if your niche is that like solving problems with
technology, right. And what I what I was doing, it
was more like learning this technology, yeah.
You see, so not actually solving a problem with this technology,
but learning this technology. Yeah.
And this could also be a niche, right?
Learning technologies. I can make 456 videos about this
technology and then in the end, just say, OK, that's my verdict.
That's why I think about it. And now let's move on to the
next one. And then you can build an
audience that are interested in that.
Yeah, as well. I've seen people do that as
well, and I think it still works.
Yeah. I just think it would be more
interesting to hear from you as a person rather than kind of the
technologies. But if it's a learning journey,
it's different, I feel like. But then the technologies are
really at the forefront. Yeah, that's the difficult part.
But you're now ready to say like goodbye to Redis for now and
pick up new technologies. Yeah, yeah.
I would actually like to to take this moment in your broadcast if
you allow it right to say. To see a proper good buy.
It's not a good buy. It's not like I'm not going to
use Red is. I really enjoyed the technology
and I found it very fun and effective to use.
But it's time to move on. It's time to move to new
technologies to learn about, go dive deeper in in coddling, Dive
deeper in Flutter, I built 2 apps recently in Flutter.
I started learning Flutter in March and I already built 2
apps. They're both in the Apple App
store. I got to put them in the Google
Play store, but I'm procrastinating about it and one
of them is generating revenue actually already.
Yeah, $10 the total. Yeah, good stuff.
Three sales for March is not that though, yeah, this is the
start. Yeah, yeah.
And I haven't like advertised it with exception in the company.
Right advertised. Sorry, advertised it to to our
colleagues, but I I haven't advertised it online.
Yeah, you see, good stuff. Yeah, people found it.
It solved their problem and they and they decided to pay for it.
It feels like you're always working on something, right?
Invite us a YouTube video blog post.
Now it now it's an app and you've already built it and it's
making money. Like, how?
Where is this kind of drive to always create?
Where does that come from? Because I've thought about
creating an app. I've never built one.
This podcast is just magic. And it happened, but it's the
only thing I've done. I've never written A blog post
other than I had to do one for job interview, but that doesn't
count. It's not published anywhere.
So yeah, I don't. I just do the podcast.
That's it. You do everything it looks like.
I don't. I don't do everything, but I not
yet, yeah. I don't do.
Everything.
But I I like to feel productive. That's the thing.
You see. I hate to sit down and just like
watch a movie. Yeah.
And my heart and my sorry. And my wife waits that
personality trait of mine because sometimes she just wants
to lay down be together cuddle. And I'm like, no, I got to.
I got to bring something. Yeah.
Yesterday, for example, she was,
she was kind of mad at me because we were in bed.
She was about to sleep and I. Took my laptop and started
writing an article, My next article about coddling and going
functional. But I think that that's the
point about me. I hate.
I hate being idle. You see, I like to work.
I like to do things. I like to feel productive.
You see, I gotta feel productive.
I gotta feel like I'm growing. It doesn't have to be like
making money, but that drives me.
Yeah, I want to do things that make money is it has always been
there because I like being productive.
I also like relaxing. I'm a very relaxed person.
Yeah. Where did this drive to for kind
of productivity come from? I think it has to do with my
upbringing, yeah. See, my dad, for example, my dad
was a workaholic, and I think he still is.
Actually, he works a lot. But since I was little, right?
And I was born in Brazil, I didn't tell anybody that.
Yeah, but I was born in Brazil and Brazilian.
And I think that the mindset in Brazil is, is a bit different.
See, because in Brazil you see a lot of poverty.
Poverty is right on the corner, right?
So you're constantly afraid of being poor, of like, not having
enough money to pay for rent or to not have a place to leave.
And since I was a kid, my dad would come to me and I say, hey
dad, can you pick, can you buy this toy for me, for example?
And he would say no, You know what?
I have a lot of debts. I have a lot of that, a lot of
that, a lot of that. And I grew up thinking, shit,
everybody has a lot of debt and I'm going to have a lot of debt,
you see. And it's like a snowball right
now. You start growing up or start
understanding it that if you have a lot of debt, it's like a
snowball. It's just starts getting bigger
and bigger and bigger and so like you're trapped in there and
you cannot get out of there anymore and that's your life
paying debt. So I was really afraid of that,
you see. So that's why I started pursuing
a financial independence, seeing that's what I'm trying to do.
I like working. I like solving problems.
I like working for other people. But at the same time, I don't
want to feel dependent. See, if, for example, my current
employer doesn't want me anymore, I don't want to be
afraid. I don't want to be afraid of
ending up in the streets. You see, that's that's the
thing. But I I said all of this and I'm
not really sure if this is actually the reason why.
I'm very. I like to do things.
This is something that I that it was like since I was a kid.
I like to. Do something.
Always, Yeah. Build something or break
something. Yeah.
I mean, it's interesting, right? In in the Netherlands, you
retire when you're like 60 something years old and it's
rising. Probably when we retire, it's
gonna be like 70 something years old, gonna be something
ridiculous. And those people that have
always done in something day in, day out, right, have always kind
of fun fulfillment and being productive, all of a sudden they
don't do that anymore. They have to do something else,
right? They've worked their whole
lives, financial independence, they they get their pension and
then sometimes they get depressed.
And yeah, I think that's it's a weird way, right?
Because you're always working towards something.
Then when you achieve it, let's say it's financial independence.
Let's say you work so hard that in your mid 30s, your mid 40s,
somewhere in your 50s, you don't have to work anymore.
You're like, I can, I can live the rest of my life without
working. And my kids and their kids are
all fine. No debt, no debt whatsoever.
My dad's debts paid off basically as a matter of saying
then what do you do because you still have this feeling of
wanting to be productive. Are you going to pick up
something like around the house? That's what I've seen a lot of
like my relatives do. I have big family like you have
lots of examples where people start gardening and stuff or
taking care of chickens for example, like people do, then
stuff that makes them happy, which is non financial related,
I feel like. Are you going to be the same?
Yeah, that, that, that's nice. That that you that you mentioned
that because I've been in that journey of trying to figure it
out what I was going to do if I became independent financially
for more than a year now, right? Because the company I was
working for, they had like crazy benefits, right?
So we had unlimited holidays. We had true flexible hours.
So I could start working whenever I wanted and stop
working whenever I wanted if I attended the meetings right.
And I was productive, I delivered.
People were happy with my work. And what does all of this mean?
It means that I could be sorry. I forgot to mention that it was
also remote. So it was a company that was in
one country and that was living in another.
So it was 100% remote. Yeah.
And I so I could be whatever I wanted and I could do whatever I
wanted, basically. On whenever I wanted.
Yeah. So whatever.
Whatever. Whenever, yeah, complete
flexibility. That's retirement.
Yeah, right. I mean, kind of.
You still have to work though. You still have to work, yeah.
Yeah. But you have the flexible hours
and you actually have to produce, right?
And then I started reading the book for our work week and I
started having sites like oh can I work 4 hours a day?
And I talk to one of the founders of the company and he
was like, yeah, if you produce as much as you do, that's fine.
I mean, if you don't, if you don't leave your team hanging,
things like that and say, okay, let's try it, then it's
difficult. It's difficult because during
your work day, you do a lot of things that are actually not
related to work, right? You start working a little bit
productive then. I didn't know.
You end up watching a YouTube video.
You end up reading an article. You go and play with your dog.
I don't know, things like that. You go and have a coffee with a
coworker and then let's say that you're already working like 6
hours a day and the other two hours are just doing other
things right? What if you could get the six
hours and condense then into part of your day and get the
other two hours and give it to yourself to do whatever you
want? So that's that was my idea,
that's what I want to try to do and how can I do it?
So I said I thought, okay, if I'm working with everybody else
at the same time, I'm going to be distracted more often, right?
Because people call you to talk about random things.
At this colleague he would call me to say what if if I wanted to
know what were the 50 or the three countries just?
Give you trivia, the three countries that we're going to
come out of, the 50 states of the United States in 20 years,
you know this, this articles that are there just for for
getting money from advertisement to see and and click and people
who click it. And I was like, damn, I got to
get rid of that. And how can I do it?
I have flexible hours. I'm going to start working at
4:00 AM in the morning. So I was waking up at 4:00 AM
working until let's say 10, o'clock 11:00 o'clock.
I would have the meetings in the morning and then it wasn't
always like that, but like sometimes I had to work like
until 1/2 depending. But I had like my afternoon, you
see. But then I started realizing,
what do I do now that I have the afternoon I got to work more
because that's that's what I know how to do, right?
And at the time, man, I I was almost burning out because I was
waking up early. Yeah, makes sense.
Yes. And that.
I mean before that, before I start working at at 4I, I was
waking up at 6-7. I was going straight into the
computer and I would stay in the computer until 1011 in the night
and go to sleep with the computer by my side shows almost
burning out. And that's what I knew how to
do, man. I only knew how to work and were
in COVID times. I would go out with my dog to
walk him. I wasn't going to the gym.
I wasn't exercising, I wasn't meeting with friends.
I was working all the time. And then I started thinking,
man, I don't want to do that. I don't want to if if I have
like a free time, I don't want to keep thinking about work.
I got to think about something else, right?
And and that's what I've been trying to do since then.
And then there are other things that happen in this journey that
helps illustrate that. But yeah, I I think I already
talked to. You have you found a mode that
kind of works for you now? Because I feel like you're still
trying to be super productive, right?
Your output is still a lot. Maybe it's not all work related,
but still little projects are still work because you're
working on them. Do you feel like you have a kind
of a better grip on not burning out in a sense?
Oh, I feel like my discipline is scrap, man.
Yeah, yeah. I don't feel like I'm mass
productive as I wanted to be. See, I really wanted to have,
like, a routine. And I'm working on that now.
Now, now I'm being able to do it, you see, because now I'm
waking up at 6:00 o'clock every morning.
I'm going to the gym. I've been doing that for two
months. I come back, I take my shower, I
get the car. I come to the office.
I work throughout the day and I get home after six or I leave
5530 get there 6 sure I woke my dog and then my idea is to stay
with my wife and I started like cooking, trying to cook at least
you see more recently. Not every day, but I try it
right and do other things as well.
I start playing, but Dell, for example, I play twice last week.
I'm gonna play again this Friday.
Nice. I'm exploring, you see, trying
to find other things that I like to do.
Yeah, non work related things, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.
Yeah, I go. It was hard.
And I feel like a lot of people still have kind of the after
effects of it. Because you couldn't go, you
couldn't go to the gym. Gym was not out.
You have a dog. You were allowed to walk your
dog out. Yeah.
If you don't have a dog, you stay inside, basically.
Yeah, it was hard. Yeah, I want to kind of zoom in
on the apps you create. But before I do that, I've never
met anyone that their company policy was unlimited holidays.
Was it really unlimited holidays or was it just kind of a BS rule
and no one took holidays at all? No, no, no.
I think. I think it was, yeah.
See, there was only this guy. He wasn't actually taking
holidays, he was taking in medical leave.
Yeah, so and he abused that for a long time.
I'm not sure what happened to him because when I left the
company he he was still working there, but but most people they
they would take like 10 days more, 20 days more, not not that
much you see and sometimes a few others would take like 5 days
less depending. It depends on the person, but it
wasn't exaggerated or abusive, you see.
But it was was peaceful, you see, because you didn't have to
think like, oh, am I going to have holidays for spending
Christmas with my family? Yeah.
Or am I going to have holidays if I, if I take this Friday off
to go to the lake with my wife, for example, she didn't have to
worry about that. So.
So that was that was very Peace of Mind, you know?
And no one looked at you funny like, oh, you're taking a
holiday. No, no, no, that's good.
Nobody did that. Yeah.
No, no, no. I like that, yeah.
I limited holidays the right way.
Yeah. Because what I've heard is like.
It's unlimited holidays, but no one actually takes holidays
because people are afraid that if you take holidays, people
look at you funny. But I'm glad that's not the
case. Yeah, this company wasn't in the
company was great. We had like a really great
culture there. You see, people got along very
well. People are productive.
People are looking for each other.
Yeah. Yeah.
And the teams, I mean, they, they look for each other for
real, you see. So if you took a holiday, people
say okay, you can take this week.
No problem. We can, we can do your part of
the work and vice versa. So it was a really great
culture. That's nice.
Yeah, really cool. Talk to me about the apps you
created, because I think I've seen screenshot here and there
on Slack, but I don't know exactly how it got started.
Did you just randomly wake up with this idea and you created
an app? Or what's kind of your process
there? OK, so I have this friend, yeah,
this Portuguese friend Ivo. And he's been working with
Flutter for a couple of years already and he's been trying to
talk to me. He's been trying to talk me into
Flutter for a long time already, you see.
And this year I didn't have a project at the time here at
Xibia and I thought okay, perhaps this is a nice way to
get to get my my time field right and be productive.
So I started learning about Flutter.
I started building an app and the first app that I built was
an Atom visualization too. So you can you can open the app
and then you can choose the the chemical element and you can see
like the core and all the the orbitals around the core running
with the with the right number of electrons, right.
So it's just a visualization too, just for me to experiment
with that to to publish it into the Apple Store and see how it
works and it's there. I think it had like 60 downloads
already, yeah, yeah, which is nice.
What about the idea, though? You were just like.
Atoms. No, no, no.
The idea was I had, I had some free time, right?
And I was like, actually, I was, I was watching a video about
black holes. And I thought, damn, that's
something that I like. But I never delved into see
physics and constellations and stars and astronomy in general.
But I'd like to. And I have this friend who's a
physicist. Is this how I say it?
Yeah, Physicist. And he started working with
software programming as well. And I went to him and I said,
hey, I wanted, I wanted to learn more about it.
And he said we should start, like reading this book.
Remember the name of the book now?
But it's even a line. And you have like all the
sections there. And you start from the very
beginning. And the very beginning were the
the atoms. Yeah.
And then I started reading about it because I wanted to learn
everything about physics. And then I started learning the
first thing I said, I said that's it.
I got to build an app, and I never touched that book again,
but I build the app. I.
Build the app and I showed it to him and he was like, man, that's
not how atoms really look like in real life.
Yeah, but I said, but that's good enough.
It gives the idea, right? I saw a video of how they work
and they're completely different from what we learn at you know,
the the, the React icon, completely wrong.
That's not how an atom looks, yeah, yeah.
That's hilarious. Yeah.
And the other app, I, I really like languages and I and I'd
like to see how languages evolve.
So you have, for example, how do you say dog in Portuguese?
You say go, right. And then how do you say that in
Spanish, Peru? Nothing I like.
But then you go to France and it's Shia, and then you go to
Italy and it's Connie. All right.
So how, how, how did these words evolve geographically?
That's what I wanted to understand.
And I could go to Google Translator anywhere else and
like, look for the words and place them on a map myself.
I said, that's too much work for a software developer, right?
You gotta build an app, yeah. And then I build the app, which
is called Word Map Translator. It's available on the App Store
and there is a free version of it where you can translate a
word to any word in European languages.
And then you're going to see all of them placed on the map.
And if you pay a little price of $3 lifetime lifetime, listen to
me, you can translate to all the languages available in in Google
Translator and basically fill up the world with all the
translations, yeah. Yeah, good stuff, man.
Yeah, this, this love for languages.
You just thought, let me build an app for that.
Like, I have a lot of ideas, right?
I make little notes. I talk to Abdullah about this.
He also makes notes. He gives them out.
I kind of keep them with me. Sometimes I give them out, but I
never create. A lot of kind of artifacts.
Like I've never written an app. I create software, it's for a
lot of companies I work with. That's it.
Usually haven't created something for myself.
You created 2 apps just randomly within a few months.
Like one of them is making money even like how do you do that?
Do you pick up an idea and execute it like effortlessly,
Effortlessly. And that word is hard, cuz I
always have a hard time starting in that aspect.
It depends. It depends on the idea, right.
I really wanted to accomplish that idea of the of the word map
translator, you see. And then I started working on
it. I started talking about it.
And that's funny because we have the Flutter Dutch meetup
community here in the in the Netherlands, right?
And they wanted to attend their their meetup, but they didn't
have spots anymore, free spots anymore.
The only way I could attend was by speaking, by doing a
lightning talk. And I said, yeah, OK, I'm going,
man. Yes.
And since I had just learned about, like flutter map and how
how to manipulate maps in Flutter, I said that's what I'm
going to talk about. So I spent like 5 minutes in
their meetup talking about how flutter map works.
Yes. And that gives you motivation,
right. Because you go there, people
applaud you. And then you tell them we're
going to finish the app in two weeks.
And then you say, oh, I got to finish the app in two weeks.
People are waiting for that, even though they weren't, of
course. But you have that in your mind,
right? Yeah.
Set the expectation like that. That's hilarious, yeah, I said.
I said them to myself. You see, And I really thought
that this could be a way of of generating revenue.
Yeah. And it worked.
Cuz I'm not advertising the app and people are subscribing.
I'm not subscribing. They're paid for.
They're paying for their lifetime.
Yeah, in that purchase. I like that a lot.
I feel like I didn't expect this, but even those kind of
components, those apps that you've built all have kind of
the learning component with them.
Either you were learning something and then you figured
out, hey, I can do this and probably find more fulfillment,
find more enjoyment and kind of reach some maybe monetization
goals here and there, like more fulfillment in general.
And then you created the Atom app and then you figured, hey,
this might be a great idea. It's probably not a solved
problem yet. Let me create an app for that
and then learn more about Flutter and how it works and
stuff like that. And there's a meet up and I go
there as well. It's like.
I'd love the journey that you're kind of on and it feels like
when opportunity is there, you just go for it.
Yeah, whenever you don't. Even think twice exactly that,
that that's the thing. If a door opens, I enter.
Yeah, yes, always. Always.
I'm always like that. Yeah.
Have you ever regretted doing that?
No. No, not at all.
Man. 0 regrets. 0 regrets. I actually regret not doing
that. OK, yes.
I never have an opportunity. I I take it, you see.
And sometimes you can have awkward situations out of there.
Tell me about that one. Yeah, cuz I speak Italian,
right? And.
But I didn't have much, much opportunity to practice Okay.
And I was working in Portugal at the time, and I was walking with
some friends into a bakery during work time and during a
break, right? And there were some girls
speaking in Italian behind us. And my friend, a friend of mine,
said, hey, they're speaking Italian, should talk to them.
I didn't think twice. I just turned around and started
speaking Italian. Right.
But then I said, I'm, I'm going to say that in English.
But I said it in Italian, right? I said hi, what are you?
But I meant, how are you exactly?
I said, what are you? And he said Italian.
And I was like, that doesn't sound right.
And then I started talking to them.
And then I realized that an older man approached it and kept
staring at me and and he was like, hey, what, what do you
what do you want? And I realized that it was their
parent that their father and that they were just like being
tourists is there. And the guy thought that it was
like trying to hit on them, but it wasn't my purpose.
So I just explained, no, I'm trying to practice Italian.
I never see somebody speaking Italian take the opportunity.
And he he said alright and I said OK.
And he was like, yeah, go away and leave my daughters alone.
Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
That's hilarious. Yeah, yeah.
Let's, let's run it off. On that note, How?
How was this? Was this kind of what you
expected? It's it's done?
No. No, we're still recording, OK,
But what do you mean expected? Was this kind of what you
expected going into it? I asked people that at the end,
Actually, yeah. And keep podcasts, I mean, no,
it was completely different. Yeah, I thought it would feel
much more tense, actually, Pretty much.
I told you, you didn't. Have to be nervous at all.
Yeah, exactly. But that that that's difficult,
right? I mean it.
You say something, but my body does something completely
different, right? I I told you like I had this
blood, this blood rushing from my coughs.
I could feel it. That was a lot of fun, man.
Thank you so much for coming on. Then I'm going to round it off.
Thank you so much for listening in.
I'm going to put all of our socials and some other stuff in
the description below, check them out, let them know you came
from our show. And with that being said, thank
you for listening. We'll see you on the next one.