Staycation Update: Content Creation, Coding, and Burnout

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

All right, I'm sitting in traffic. I might as well turn the camera on and get recording. That's what Code Commute is all about. Um, I figured I'll just spend a little bit of time talking about um what I'm going to be doing over my few days off here. Uh, so for those of you that are sort of new to the channel over the past like 5 months, been having a lot of burnout from work, working on a a big project that just wrapped up. So, taking the week off work, I'm trying to nail down a bunch of stuff. Um, because there's a lot of things that I like doing or I'm building stuff or spending time on things. Um, I think for some people they might see it and go, "Well, that's causing burnout." But those are actually things that I really love to do. So, I figured I'd talk a little bit about that.

Um, and then maybe dive in a little bit more specifically into some of the coding stuff that I'm working on. So, uh, friendly reminder if you're new to the channel, uh, this channel's all about, you know, answering questions that you have. So, leave them below in the comments if you got them or send a message to, uh, to Dev Leader on social media. It's also my main YouTube channel. I'm thinking about taking the domain. I bought a domain for Code Commute a while ago. Um, I might turn that into like a a landing page for submissions and stuff. Maybe I'll like I'll live stream vibe coding it or something. That could be kind of fun. But just mentioning it because maybe I'll uh I'll shake things up a little bit and all these videos where I'm like go to dev leader and send a message. I'll say go to codemute.com and go submit your question there.

So we'll see. That could be kind of fun. But um today it's going to be focused on on me. So um over the past little while man this person doesn't know how a roundabout works. Oh boy, someone was in the roundabout and stopped to try and let other people in. Not good. Um, over the past few months, I haven't really had as much time to to put into my YouTube videos on my main channel as I want. And historically, I've aimed for three YouTube videos a week on my main channel. uh that's kind of fallen off because just from being burnt out, right? Uh either I have stuff that's physically taking up my time and I can't get around to recording or the time comes up and I'm like, man, like I can't I can't sit down, open up Visual Studio, and try to cobble together like a you know, a dummy project to walk through.

Like I don't I don't have it in me. And so it sucks because I actually like being able to put out content like that. I like making the tutorials and helping people out that way. Um, but I haven't been able to give it attention. So, I'm going to be spending some time this week doing more of that. I did two resume reviews yesterday and I think the editor already has them uploaded to YouTube right now. And then uh I'm gonna record a couple more today on um not resume reviews but some some smaller tutorials. So my caching sort of a YouTube playlist that I have it's a caching repository pattern entity framework um Dapper like things how you can do data access including caching. I did a video about using a distributed cache or hybrid cache with uh with Reddus, but then I realized some people don't even know how to set up Reddis.

I had certainly never had to set it up locally. So, I figured why not make a little tutorial on, you know, how you can just get a local instance of Reddus up and running, something simple, but like I'll just show you how to do it. So, I'm going to record that today. I'll probably do the next entry in that um that playlist. And um sorry, I was stuck buying a a lot of really slow cars. And uh what else? There was a couple other things I wanted to start. Well, two other maj uh major things. One is on some logging stuff that I've been doing more recently with Brand Ghost and uh really it's like it's not even groundbreaking or anything like that. I just haven't spent time doing it. So, I'm going to be talking about um scoping logs for structured logging. So, that allows you to add in some extra metadata to your logging statements because what I've been doing is trying to make them more uniform across my application.

But what I end up doing is like slapping everything into these uh into the log messages. So then I can like search through my logs and find the stuff, but it's not like it's not like a first class type of thing. And it's not as consistent. If I forget to change a log message to include a user ID or like a a content ID or something else, then I kind of screwed up. But if I use logging scopes and I can actually have that information uh within the scope of the logging scope and basically get it for free tacked on. So I think that's going to dramatically improve the debugability of uh stuff I have going on in Brand Ghost. And I'm just going to do a couple little tutorials on that kind of thing because it's simple. Um, I think it has a ton of value and I think for even for someone like me, like I've been programming in C for like 13 years and um I don't know.

It's like one of those things I never I've been saying 13 years. It's got to be longer than that. It's like 18 years. I've been when I tried to do the math on it, I was picking 2012. That's when I graduated university. I've been programming in C for another 5 years on top of that. So, oops. Um, so like 18 years. It's been a long time using C. So, been using it for a long time, but I haven't been using structured logging like effectively. So, I'm going to I'm going to do that in a video and then I'm going to do a little bit of open telemetry stuff. I want to explore it myself first, but I want to use uh the tracing functionality in Aspire, but I want to prove it and see it working in my own application cuz right now I'm using Aspire.

The dashboard doesn't show the tracing. I'm going to get that up and running and then do a little tutorial on it. Really basic stuff. some of these tutorials, especially if it's newer content for me, I don't want to try and come across like an expert that has like 20 years of knowledge in this very specific feature because that would be lying. I just want to give people the basics so they can jump in and see the value. So, we'll do that. And then um actually some of the folks at Microsoft uh I don't know what team specifically but someone had reached out and they said hey like um if you if you're looking to do more content some of the testing framework stuff has been updated recently and uh so like MS test and that kind of stuff and they said it might be really good to dive back into that and maybe do some videos on that.

So, it's not I should have said, "Hey, man, like you'll have to sponsor me, which is kind of backwards, like trying to get my own employer, a different team to like sponsor me to make videos." But anyway, I'm going to make some videos on it. Uh, but I have to go through and read the material because my understanding is that we have all of these testing frameworks like XUnit's like one of the really popular ones, right? Nunit, XUnit, there's a bunch of them. But uh I think historically like when I've done polls online everyone that's a .NET developer like overwhelming majority is XUnit XUnit XUnit but I think MS test if I understand correctly has basically just introduced a ton of stuff that like puts it on par or past Xunit but I have not yet played with it. So I need to spend some time I need to go through it.

I'll probably do like a couple of intro videos and then I'm gonna start diving deeper into those features. Um because like I said, I don't want to talk about it from an expert perspective unless I'm actively using it. So that's going to be the other really big segment. I don't know how much of that this week I'll get into, right? Like I need to spend time with it, but if I'm spending time exploring it that I'm not spending time recording it. So, I got to find the right balance. And then, uh, codewise. So, that's all the content creation stuff I'm going to be focused on. I'm actually really excited because that's a bunch of new stuff to look at. Coding wise in Brand Ghost. I mentioned in the previous video I recorded doing a big authentication refactor. It's uh it's pretty painstaking. Um, it's just like it's a lot of files that have to change.

It's not like complicated. It's just a lot. I'm trying to leverage cursor to help with that. I don't know, man. the people that are like claiming they have so much success with agents, I like I have a really hard time believing uh what's what's being built because for me um it's either ridiculously wrong just like I can't believe it even did that or there's some times where I'm like hey like that that seemed to do the thing I wanted but then I look a a little bit closer and I find all of the things that it just didn't do or it did wrong. So there's been a couple of times now where I I'll tell it like so for context uh a lot of what I build is plug-in based which means that I will have different features that follow similar patterns but they're not

coupled together right so if you think about different social media platforms brand ghost posts to different social media platforms I have to have code that looks similar across all of them right there's going to be something for posting there's going going to be something for analytics. There's going to be something for getting the feed of posts. It's all it's like similar but different implementations. There's authentication, right? So, what's happening is like it will go do it and on the surface I'm like, "Oh, that looks good." And then I look a little bit closer and I'm like, "Wait a second." Yes, it like refactored this thing to go meet the pattern, but like it also just like deleted some code. Like just completely remove the lines that like need to be there. So, it's really unfortunate because like I want to trust it, but it's either like I said doing stuff completely wrong, which I catch pretty quick, it's um partially doing things.

So, I have I have this like false confidence that it's it's done and it's not done or it looks like it's done and it actually just screwed up a bunch of that I have to go back and fix. So, what's funny right now is the stuff that I'm having it do, I'm not actually sure if it's saving time, right? the the tasks that I'm giving it in my mind. I'm like, "Hell yeah, this should save me a ton of time because I can give you four patterns or I've already done it slightly different in each case, but like you should be able to see the common theme." And it I'm think I'm on out of like 20 or so. I'm I'm over halfway and it's still not getting them right. I've tried giving it I followed my one of my previous videos. I was explaining about using git diffs to be able to identify bugs.

So I gave it a diff and I said here's an example of me doing a migration for one of these other platforms. You should be able to do the same thing for this platform. And uh and then it doesn't do it properly for all the reasons I mentioned. So part of me is like I want to stick to the path a little bit because I think this is a very helpful use of agents and AI. Like go refactor and clean up my code for me because pardon my language like I got better to do that's more creative that's not like you know kind of like nitpicky just going through stuff like you go do that. Go change a couple things around. and here's a bunch of patterns you can follow, but it's just it's not there yet for me. So, I want to make sure that I'm staying up with the tools, leveraging them, tweaking my approach that I can get better.

Maybe it's all me, you know? I'm if that's the case, I'm happy to take responsibility and try to learn how to do it better, but it's uh it's got some room. So, doing this author factor. Uh, I do want to like I was just talking about like some of the tracing stuff for YouTube videos and uh uh sorry, log scoping. I'm going to be doing some of that in Brand Ghost. So, I'm definitely already on top of the log scoping, but the the tracing I would really like to be able to see uh some of the tracing come together. So that would mean web requests coming from the front end to the back end. But also I want to see if I can do tracing when courts which is the job scheduling framework when that kicks off a job that's not coming from like a a web API.

Okay. So I would love to be able to see if I can do tracing when quartz kicks off a run like a scheduled job. Can I see it start from the top of that job run and then get tracing throughout um the rest of the call stack would be super cool um to try that out. So that's what I'm going to be looking at. I think otherwise terms of like highle features there's a couple of like AI content generation things I want to start exploring and um one of them like I can use chat GBT for it already but I'd like to have it done automatically for me. So here's the here's the concept. So right now I have um trying to think when I did this. I did this like maybe a month ago. I had roughly at the time I had 200 videos on code commute.

I used uh some code inside of Brand Ghost. I pulled all of the transcripts from all of those videos and I dumped them to a file. I uploaded that file to ChatGpt. So now it has 200 videos of me talking like this. This is how I talk. It's literally me talking. So you have the style of how I talk. You have the the topics that I talk about, my opinions on these things across 200 videos. There's like another almost 50 that I have to go export now. But I took that content and then I asked Chat GBT like, "Hey, like write a something or give me ideas for what to talk about. Like I can use it to get ideas for content." And what I would like to do is just make that a first class thing inside of Brand Ghost. So we have this concept of a content library.

We haven't launched it publicly yet but um you can basically have content that you will use for posts and content can be anything. So it could be your pictures like your media could be uh like templates for posts and stuff. I want to make sure that it supports things like uh like videos or transcripts, that kind of stuff, because this is all stuff that it's literally material, right? It's material that we can work with. And I want to basically automatically pull the transcripts when I upload videos to YouTube. I want that into my content repository that we have in Brand Ghost. And then I want to see it uh and like we have this part coming already, but I want to see that based on the transcripts that it can like generate some content for me. What I want to do is a more targeted proof of concept is I want to see if I can take um my YouTube videos.

So when I publish one, I would like brand ghost. We already have this part hooked up. It's using RSS feeds. So, we publish a video. I would like the RSS feed to activate and then pull the transcript and then I want it to actually make me a uh like a template or like a skeleton for a blog post because I have not written aside from my newsletter, I haven't written a technical blog article since uh one year ago. It's been over it's been 12 months now almost exactly. And uh I don't like that. I'm just too busy doing other stuff. And blogs are the first thing to drop off because the the time that goes into writing a technical blog article versus sort of like the return in terms of uh traffic, in terms of viewership, it's not it's just not worth it. But if I could have it be a little bit more automatic, I think that would be cool.

I can do things like having it so when it generates the blog post has a reference to the video right inside of it. Uh I always found those types of blog articles for me did better. So I'm going to see if I can just wire this stuff up to be more automatic. I don't know if I'm going to get to that this week in Brand Ghost, but that's a feature I'd like to build out because um right now a lot of the stuff in Brand Ghost before we started having paying customers, a lot of it is driven by my content creation and the things I need. So, so far that's worked really well. But uh obviously we have stuff that users are asking for. But this is for me in my content journey. One of the biggest opportunities is like sort of re releveraging content. I don't mean like re um reposting it that's already built in.

But I already do this with code commute and the rest of my stuff. I take these videos from code commute every week on a Friday I look at what the best performing video was in terms of views interactions and then whatever it is that becomes my newsletter article. So I go write a newsletter article and then I make my live stream on dev leader about that. So, I'm building my own sort of content pipeline for ideas and thanks to all of you for submitting questions and stuff on this channel. That really helps me so that I'm not just like, you know, every week I'm like, "Oh what am I going to write about? What's a live stream going to be about?" I still do that a little bit, but I just go to code commute and then I'm like, "Well, this was a topic people were interested in.

it makes sense to write about it and to talk about it in a live stream. So, gives me some confidence that way, but um to have it be a little bit more automatic would be great. I found too um even with earlier days of uh you know earlier chat GPT and stuff just to have it give me the framing for the blog post like give me give me some ideas give me some like I don't know important points it would be good to call out just like give me that and then like let me go because I found that without having that I would be like oh man like I don't know how to start I'll procrastinate. I'll put it off. It's like the barrier to entry is too high. And um just having a little bit of help from AI to get that going was like, oh man, like suddenly the barrier doesn't seem insurmountable anymore.

So those are some of the things I'm going to be doing, but it's only Tuesday that I'm recording this. So got another few days off. and I'm pumped. So, thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.