What a Journey has it been being working on this wonderful industry of Software Engineering.
I’ve shared content multiple times, through this blog, countless time through Lunch n’ Learn sessions at all companies I’ve worked. Hosted session at my house and friends house teaching them software Engineering, some of them successfully landing a job on industry, despite the fact their background being totally unrelated to I.T. I’ve convinced people to join I.T., abandon their jobs and everything – all of them successful – achievements not displayed on my resume but I hold great pride in it.
Coaching, teaching – it has been a thing on my life, not only I.T. but socially as well, for those who don’t know I’ve taught Social Dancing called Forró for almost 4 years – so yeah, teaching is part of me.
A next chapter on this teaching journey, I’ve fancied on creating for a long time is: Creating a YouTube Channel and I’ve finally made decision to do so, below is my first video:
There are a few considerations I would like to leave documented here:
Recently I’ve started working professionally with Go. Although I had absolutely zero professional experience with Go, to be fair I’ve maybe committed twice on a repo 2 years back, on super simple changes, but still, no experience – a team accepted me, so here I am working with Go – I am honored to be accepted at this new team at Tesla and I am loving it so far.
I will not mention my employer on the channel, not directly or indirectly. I’ve noticed at my site, that Tesla is everywhere – yeah, I am proud to be working at Tesla here at Silicon Valley – at the same time, equally afraid of their policy about mentioning Tesla in public.
In short, it is purely because of FEAR. Not sure it is a sentiment a company wants their employees to have. However I understand it is important to keep company content private – so to avoid confusion at all costs, I will not mention anything remotely to Tesla there. What I can say there is: I Love working at my employer, thank you for allowing me help the world towards accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
Currently I am working in the US under the famous work visa called H-1B. Such work visa does not allow you other source of incomes. YouTube channels included. So I disabled “Monetization” on my channel and explicitly said so on “About” page. Honestly my goal is not remotely close extra revenue or monetization – I am doing this for free, because I truly want to volunteer my time to help others! <3
Creating videos are HARD – to be more precise, creating GOOD videos are hard. Great content addresses several aspects like: Lightning, Audio, Video Editing and above all Good content – which is also complex by itself like fast paced content, mixing media, presentations, being engaging, pushing code to GitHub and make it interactive, etc. It is tough. I’ve invested 3 weeks of my spare time to produce this channel + first video. Hopefully upcoming videos will be slightly easier and faster to produce.
Other consideration is, I am Brazilian, born and raised, moved to Canada at age of 23, lived there for almost 8 years, was honored with Canadian citizenship – now I am Canadian and love Canada very much. I am currently living at San Francisco CA, USA only due to the fact Tesla offered me a position and I wanted to further grow my professional career. However the point is, I speak Portuguese as mother tongue. All my Brazilian friends are asking an equivalent channel in Portuguese as well, to reach their audience. I would love to do that, the thing is, A channel by itself is already super hard. Can you imagine supporting two channels? How much spare time do I have? I have a family, a wife and a daughter + looking forward to have a second child in the near future. Time is precious, so that double time to a second channel for now might be tough. It is a thing I am considering, but not right now, perhaps in near future, let me experience more about this YouTube world, see how it goes, etc.
Truly, my goal is to teach others and provide good content. I am not looking for exposure, being known in the Software Community or anything, just teaching others. If I ever reach 10k subscribers + 5000 hours watched, I will be super satisfied. Do the math, Each 1:1 or KT session I facilitate, reach what, 1 to 50 people at the time? If each session being 1 hour, that is still very few hours of reach. YouTube allows you to reach thousands of people and that is extremely appealing on a teaching stand point – so that’s the reason.
That’s it for now. Thank you everyone!
