A Tumultuous (Yet Productive) Month
Elon takes over Twitter, I go back to streaming and a wealth of new research.
Well, it’s been a bit of a month, hasn’t it?
This month has seen a lot of changes. The economy is doing… it’s thing, Elon took over Twitter and seems hell-bent on tanking it and I’ve started livestreaming software development content.
See ya next month!
Just kidding…
The Takeover Heard Round the Net
I don’t know how thick the rock you’d have to live under would have to be to miss the news of the quite hostile takeover of Twitter, but I’m going to assume you’re like the rest of us: sipping tea, watching to see what becomes of one of the largest social media sites in the world.
Elon Musk bought Twitter among what seems to be at least relatively confirmed rumors of immediate and drastic layoffs. He then immediately took aim at assuaging the worries of the all-important advertisers, a herculean effort that seems to have outright failed thus far. Then, seeking to staunch the bleeding of cash through billions of dollars of new debt, he decided to make Twitter verification a premium paid option for Twitter users, a “feature” that goes into effect as early as next week. All the while he took part in a series of trolling (and begging) efforts aimed at some of his critics and changed his bio from “Chief Twit” to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator,” seemingly ignoring calls to become at least slightly more professional with his new role of social media mogul.
I won’t insult the intelligence of all tens of my readers in pretending like I have any positive notions about the takeover. I think the internet became a significantly worse place when the Chief Twit took over, and I moved fairly quickly to secure my spot on my alternative of choice, Mastodon. I invite you to join me in the Fediverse… or don’t. Regardless, I’ll be sticking around a good bit to watch the ship burn, but I’ll probably start moving my political commentary to Mastodon and keeping my Twitter account a bit more business and tech focused.
This Month’s Research
The most notable item of the month is that I’ve decided to start livestreaming malware development 2-3 times a week over on my YouTube channel. There are a couple reasons why.
Research - This basically allows me to balance content output with research, because I can essentially do both at once. The way I had (unsuccessfully) done it before was doing a couple hours of research, collecting my learnings, compiling it into a video form, editing for hours and putting it out to an audience of like a dozen people. I’d spend hours on one video and it would usually flop. Instead, I do the research live, with (usually helpful) people watching, and I’d get more actual research done with no time wasted on editing and such.
Watch hours - My streams have thus far outperformed everything except for my most popular videos, both in terms of views and watch hours. To get monetized on YouTube, I have to build up 4,000 hours of watch time over a 1 year period. At my earlier rate, this would have taken me… a decade. At the rate I’m going now, it will likely just take a couple months. This is because people will join me live for, say, an hour long stream, and some of them will stay for the full hour, most will stay for at least a good bit of it, and I’ll rack up a couple hours while streaming and then several hours when people go back and watch the recordings. It’s a great way to accelerate growth.
Community - People really like being part of the solution, and most of the people that join live have been super helpful. That helps both in accelerating the research and in just having a more enjoyable experience.
So, if you want to join in on the fun, you can hop over to my channel, subscribe and get notified when I go live!
Blog output
I just finished off a fun article on a roadmap to becoming a good developer. I’m frankly proud of what I produced there, so I definitely recommend going to check it out.
I’ve also released a couple blogs on different systems I’m studying:
Make - Make is a build system for compiling and linking C or C++ based projects. It’s a subject I’ve meant to study before, but with the new livestream format I’ve finally found time to do it.
FastAPI+React - This month I released a couple blogs on the Python FastAPI framework: a primer on FastAPI, one on benchmarking FastAPI against Flask, and finally an article on building a simple scraping dashboard with React and FastAPI. I’ve really enjoyed doing a deep dive on this stack and look forward to releasing more in the future.
I’ve got some more articles in the pipeline, specifically some on malware development and C-level system programming, so be on the lookout for those! You can subscribe to my Ghost blog to know when all of that comes out.
/Miscellaneous
In terms of other projects, I’ve got a couple of things going.
I’ve been writing a book on web scraper development for a while now and it’s at least getting closer to release. I’m thinking about releasing it around mid-December, but you can get it now for a discounted price ($8.00) while it’s a work in progress and you’ll get the full version once it’s released for no extra cost.
I’m working with a co-founder on a startup app that’s been in the works for a couple of months. We’re looking at a limited release by the end of the year, but there’s nothing public (yet) so you’ll just have to watch that space!
I’m fleshing out some ideas for small, cheap courses to release early next year. I’m thinking web scraper development, React for beginners, C/C++ for beginners, things like that. If you have anything specific in mind, hit me up on Twitter!