At egghead, we would love to be able to work with everybody and take the time and care that is required to craft world-class educational materials with as many folks as possible.
Unfortunately, we can't.
The good news? We've got some suggestions on how you can start building the skills needed to get invited as an egghead instructor and generally improve your own career generally in the process.
You don't need our permission to create screencasts.
This is important to understand. egghead is a platform. We curate learning content for professional web developers. egghead is a small team focused on quality learning materials.
You don't need us.
You can start today. You can use this guide to understand some of what goes into making screencasts for egghead and just freaking do it.
Please share what you make with us and the rest of the world, and keep it up.
That's how you get noticed. Doing and creating.
Teaching everything you know. ❤️
It can be challenging and intimidating to learn in public, particularly if you are just starting out.
Writing is a skill.
Presenting screencasts is a skill.
Hosting a live stream is a skill.
It takes consistent focused practice to get good at these skills, just like web development itself. The good news is that they are related and make powerful levers for your career and personal growth.
They can all be practiced in parallel with your continued growth as a professional developer and showcase your ability to communicate effectively and a willingness to share with others that ultimately has the potential to set you apart from others that aren't willing to put in the same level of effort.
Write about what you are learning right now
Keep a learning journal! Post publically, preferably on your own domain, but dev.to is fantastic too.
You don't have to post 5000-word technical tutorials.
Keep it simple and informative. Provide context and links. Write for yourself. Pick a friend or colleague and write for them. It's often easier to "just f'n do it" if you have a specific individual you are writing for.
Give it a try!
Practice sharing what you know and what you learn. It's a habit. A skill.
Share what you write on Twitter!!
Creating Screencasts
We maintain an egghead instructor guide that details our process for creating content at egghead.
In the guide, we talk about the technical and content development aspects for producing high-quality screencasts for web developers. You can safely ignore the fancy equipment we recommend. We have to have consistent audio quality across thousands of screencasts so the gear is meant to help ensure that for our paying members.
We think Screenflow is fantastic on the Mac and Camtasia is great for Windows.
Follow the guide. Share what you know. Post it on twitter. Share here.
Start live streaming your learning.
Live streaming is incredibly powerful and rewarding
Live streaming is also intimidating to get started!
Some of the technical details are related to screencasting with some significant differences.
This guide from Suz Hinton is great.
Chris Biscardi has also started a community for folks that are creating live stream content:
discord.gg/kagheT
The community is heavily focused on supporting each other to start streaming code (or design), writing blog posts, and talking shop about consulting and product businesses.
We include people that write about GraphQL, Docker, K8s, Gatsby, Vue, and more.03:56 AM - 01 Dec 2019
0
14
What else?
These are difficult skills to master, but worth the effort to hone. They are superpowers. Learning in public benefits your career and paves the way for others. It's a way to actively participate in a community you help to build.
Top comments (1)
Hey Joel, super interesting to see that you are trying to create great teaching resources for professional developers! You seem to have identified some obvious problems with regular screen-sharing. Have you ever tried using the Live Share extension? I would be interested in know what you think of it and how it measures up according to you for teaching.