Kevin: Hello my front-end friend and welcome to my podcast General Musings. My name is Kevin and here in my podcast I talk about whatever is front of mind for me in any given week usually in some way that's related to front-end development and I tend to ramble and talk about different things along the way as well. So welcome and glad you're here. We're gonna start for some random stuff. One thing I'm gonna be trying to do throughout this episode and I'm talking kind of weird right now maybe is slow down how fast I talk. ⁓ I realize I talk very quickly when I'm recording and for some people that's fine. But for some people they say I talk too fast. I know it's an issue I've had. I just recorded a bunch of shorts and in shorts I talk fast because I have to get under three minutes. And so I'm consciously trying to slow down now as I'm doing some long form content and I realize that it also means, you know, if somebody I listen to most things at between one and a half to two X depending on the type of content it is. So Nobody is going, know, people who want to speed things up are already doing that anyway. So we'll try and keep it slow for the people who prefer that. especially for this type of content where it should be more relaxed. We need to, I want to keep it the relaxed vibe, slow things down a little bit and all of that. And I guess that makes me think a little bit of what I want to talk about this week, but I know if I get into that now, I'm going to forget to mention that I should be using this place to plug things and I want to plug that I'll be in Amsterdam from April 13th to 16th, I believe, for Smashing Conference. I'm going to be giving both an in-person workshop as well as a talk, so if you can attend that'd be amazing. And yeah, even if you can't, just let me, if you're in the area, let me know. But if you can attend or if you don't have tickets yet and you're thinking about going, I'll include a link down below that includes a nice healthy little discount. to get your tickets. They have both in-person and online tickets if you're interested for the conference, for their workshop, it is in-person only. And so yeah, you can check those out if you're interested. I'm very excited for both the talk and the workshop. been doing some more, I rebuilt my slide deck again. I've been doing some work on the talk recently and I'm trying to make sure I can fit everything I wanna talk about in. the amount of time they're giving me. It's one nice thing about having my own channels. I can just talk as long as I want. I don't have like imposed time limits. So actually having to get something to be within a very specific amount of time is a unique challenge that I'm not always used to. But yeah, that's the big thing. I guess the big announcement, the plug. We can get now into the content itself, which is about... a little bit on how we should slow things down maybe, talking about slowing things down without talking, and talking about shorts because I'll talk more about the shorts thing in a second. ⁓ But I guess the main thing is to do with shorts in a way because I'm going to be doing an experiment with my shorts over the next few months where I'm going be trying different types of content and posting a lot more shorts than I normally do. ⁓ because shorts are easy to make and it's easy to experiment and see what clicks. I've had quite a few shorts swing very well recently and I know a lot of people listening right now aren't necessarily shorts people. I get a lot of feedback from people like, I don't really like shorts, but they do well. And lots of people do watch them. So I don't know who the people watching them are since everybody tells me they don't. But yeah, I'm gonna experiment with different types of content. I can't really repurpose tutorials. just because the format is so different. ⁓ It just becomes more work to repurpose than to re-record something specific, focusing on the thing that I would be trying to remix anyway. ⁓ So part of the experiment that I'm doing is to just continue with the tips and tricks that seem to be working. I think that's a really popular thing is like, here's a CSS tip in 30 seconds to two and a half minutes, maybe three minutes at the most. that I can learn, ⁓ there's this cool new thing. That's what a lot of people want anyway. Like I just want to be aware of what I'm able to do. And so, yeah, those tips are not going away. There'll be one of those a week. There'll be one thing that's sort of educationally focused, but a remix of some sort. And then there's other ones that are actually remixed content from here that I'm going to be putting on the main channel to see what happens. ⁓ Mostly on... Interviews that I've done so with Adam Argyle Josh Como I want to get some done with the interview I did with Sarah so we Dane as well And yeah, I think just to see how those are received on the main channel just because they're I like having the interviews here first of all interview Most people don't like long-form interviews that are subscribed to my channel people like long-form interviews But my channel has a very specific focus and niche and any time I do any sort of convergence from there It just doesn't do well, which is partially why I created this channel is like this is where everything else comes and the people who like everything I do can come over here and get the rest of it and Yeah, that I guess is why I'm gonna just experiment and see how those click where I can focus on little bits that I think Still like audience can get value out of them that listen to CSS tips It's it's related enough and condensed down to like the the highlight reels right when you're doing that type of content But because I have so much going on, I needed to figure out how, the scheduling of it all. And there's all these scheduling things. Like I have a thing to help cut down the shorts and you can schedule directly through there. ⁓ can schedule in YouTube works, but it's, you know, there's a, it's tedious. There's other things like the social buffers, the one I can think of. And there's another one that I've tried in the past. where can like schedule your posts out. So you have everything in the calendar and everything else. The problem with all of this is it's like this extra tool adding to your library. And this comes a little bit to a conversation, not a conversation, a talking head, I guess, like this one by Cassidy Williams, Cassidy, Cassidy, ⁓ where she was talking about our SaaS, is SaaS dead or our SaaS product dead because people can just, you know, vibe code their way to creating a specific tool for them to use. And I'll link to that in the description. The gist of it is no, because then you create 10 tools, now you're responsible for maintaining 10 tools. And there's the costs associated sometimes with doing that ends up being more expensive and you probably get something worse in the end. ⁓ And I think it comes down also to like this idea of how there's all these tools getting created to solve all these like small problems and this has been happening forever and it's just happening more now and that with you know, the vibe coding and people throwing these products together and a lot of them have issues with them. But I also don't think they solve like they tell us they're going to solve this problem but it just becomes this extra tool that we have to go into that's in a different place than like Maybe if you have this one very specific job, it lines up well for someone like me who has, you know, I'm making long form videos and short form videos and I have to make thumbnails and write descriptions and edit videos and create website stuff. you know, create demos and all of that side that goes into the educational side and keep track of all of these different things and focus on courses and talks and workshops. And there's just. all of these different responsibilities I have that sometimes the best tool is writing things on pen and paper. And so I like printed out calendars. I can just write on and I've done this for like 10 years. And every time I'm trying to like, I'm sorry for jumping a little bit, but like I use Notion for almost everything, for basically everything I do. ⁓ And the content calendar is fantastic. But even there, there's two things that happen. I can use Notion. to literally have every single thing I have on one linked database that's pulling everything in and putting, and the calendars becomes overwhelming to look at it and useless in the end. So I have like a main content calendar where I have my newsletter, like my outward content, like the public facing content, my newsletter ⁓ and all my YouTube videos go into that calendar. And that's fantastic for me to keep track of things. My editor. has access to there, the videos are all in there, everything happens there, so that's great. My courses are all in there, but they're in a separate database and they live in and do their own thing and I have all of my course stuff going via Notion and its other area. And every time I try and overlap things, I just get overwhelmed and the system starts getting too complicated and then I just stop using it. And I think there's like a lot to be said and that's at the beginning when I was talking about slowing down. is sometimes like stepping back and just like, okay, I don't need another tool. I have every tool I need. I have too many tools that I'm not actually using. And I'm really good at like, ⁓ this extra, you know, this thing can do this new thing for me for not very expensive. I should try it out. ⁓ I usually will use it for two months and then never use it again. And so it wasn't worth it. ⁓ So, you know, just using pen and paper, I find Amazing. I made a mistake when I did this of not highlighting and doing other things or using different marker colors Maybe for the different types of things I was writing down so it became a little bit chaotic But it was it's the easiest thing for me and it is funny because it's actually easier to move things around I can also then look at it and then start adding on top of like, okay I have the content planned on here These are the days the different things are happening or what I need like I need shorts on these days long form content on these days I'm also trying to plan all of this for like the next three months. And that's where the calendars on the screen fall apart a little bit. Cause looking at, to get the big picture and small picture at the same time becomes difficult because you have either so much screen, I have a big screen and I don't want to have like three digital calendars up. don't like moving stuff around becomes harder to do. But then I also need to see the big picture having it just printed in front of me. That's me see all of that. ⁓ And as I saying, I can put my content in there. Okay, that means I need to dedicate these days to then doing these tasks. So I have my tasks as well as the content, as well as my focus areas and all these different things can all go on there, even though it's small. And I have my own like notation and everything, so I know what everything is. yeah, I think that we're in this like abundance of tools and it's too easy to make tools to solve some of our problems now. And we end up. sometimes there's just these tools exist because now it's easier to make them and sometimes we make our own tools because like ⁓ I have this problem that I need solving and I'm gonna create a new thing to solve it and then that itself becomes a problem because it's as ⁓ Cassidy said becomes this new thing that you have to maintain and potentially a bigger time suck the problem that it's actually solving right ⁓ so yeah that's sort of the gist of what I wanted to talk about today. I also, if you didn't see it, had some fun putting a website together about, put it on YouTube. It's actually, wasn't sure if it would be like a complete flop. I sort of expected it to be, because it's a little bit different talking about like different types of content and how I like experimenting over there. But Formula One is kicking off today, which is super exciting. I'm a huge Formula One fan. So I put all the websites from Formula One against one another, where I rated them based on design. accessibility, performance, and CSS. And the design one was me deciding which one had the nicest versus worst design and like UI, UX together. ⁓ And then rated them in order and then assign them points based on their point system, the F1 point system. And then the other ones were all based on metrics from Lighthouse and Project Wallace. Anyway, it was a fun video. If that sounds interesting to you and you haven't seen it yet, I'll make sure to link that one in the description. ⁓ as well as over on the main channel and it was fun and surprisingly how bad some sites are like not even bad in terms like your formula one team you'd expect to be like yeah we want to have this like cool thing right like it's first of all exploding it's a huge industry now and you'd think you'd want a cool website to like go with your brand but apparently some teams even some where you would expect them to be spending money on that type of thing because brand seems important to them aren't so i thought that was kind of curious And then you get the obviously some that look good that don't perform well and then some that don't look good and perform terribly which is the worst possible mix But it is what it is and I guess not all that surprising knowing the state of the web these days ⁓ But I think that's it for this week. If you do end up attending Smashing Conference, make sure you stop me and say hi. I know it can be a very shy type of thing. Like I'm introvert and shy and don't like bugging people. But while I'm there, ⁓ part of why I'm there is to meet people and say hi to people. So yeah, stop me. Yeah, I think that's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. And of course, until next time, don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome. Let's see, even tried to, I usually say that part really fast and we slowed it down too. ⁓