Article / 27th Apr 2017

Expanding Into Video

I've been doing public speaking for a moderately long time now - this year is my tenth - and I've met many people at conferences who have come up and told me how they've enjoyed some of my past talks, often through watching a video of them online. (If you are one of these people, thank you - doing talks is only fun when people get enjoyment out of them, and it's nice to know it's happening)

I also don't really write blog posts as much as I should, often because I can find it difficult to take down in words what I'm thinking. I'll happy talk someone's ear off in person, but not find the time or means to get those feelings and subtleties down in writing.

All this, along with a clear disregard for my own free time, has led me to try and cover some of my projects and other work in the form of videos - ones that are produced and recorded specifically as videos rather than being videos of talks.

I took on a small electronics project I was going to do anyway as my first topic, and I'm not too appalled by the end result (once I had got over the pain of watching myself again and again in the video editor - I have even more verbal and visual tics than I thought). If you want to listen to me talk about thermistors, voltage dividers and Grafana for 19 minutes, here you are:

Since it's one of my more popular projects in recent years, I want to cover my San Francisco version of my London LIDAR 3D map, and I didn't want that to be my first foray into video. The Arduino project provided a good first thing to record, as well as hopefully also being informative. Of course, all the code I wrote for the video is available on GitHub.

I don't mean to stop doing blog posts - I personally prefer a well written blog post over a video for projects - but I'd like to see if there's an audience for video content out there as well. I plan on taking some of my talk subjects (Channels, system architecture, building for failure) and making short videos of those as well, and hopefully documenting my visits to an ever-increasing number of countries. If there's something you know I do you'd particularly like to see, do get in touch and let me know!