Making Ember easier to approach (aka Crazy Screencasts/Videos that will Stick in Your Mind for learning Ember)

I’ve been making a “how to start building web apps from the ground up” for, well, pretty much everyone.

I wonder if there’s interest enough to launch this, so this is a kind of “putting a feeler out there” kind of post. If you’re interested in paying a small amount per month to have a set of small videos that go from wo to go on web application development, please click the like button on this. I’ll put up one of the first videos so you can get an idea of the sort of thing I’m planning if there’s enough interest.

I should also mention that I’m pro-Ember, so these videos introduce Ember sort of at the beginning, from a new person’s perspective, including the rationale. I have some interesting ideas about how to present things to new people, and I’d be happy to share the philosophy behind this a bit more if there’s interest.

Enough interest would be, say, 100 people willing to sponsor $5 per month for probably like 8 pretty good quality videos per month.

So yeah, I’ll put a link up to the “intro” one on youtube if there are over 100 likes on this post.

Click like now! Go on, do it :slight_smile:

I’d LOVE to do this, so I hope there’s lots of interest :slight_smile:

20 Likes

This sounds like a really awesome idea. Is this something you’ve done before, or any other examples of your work online? It would probably be a lot easier for people to justify the expense if they had some idea of the relative production value/quality.

Looking forward to it!

You’re right Tom, I was thinking about this last night actually. Asking for people’s interest without showing off some of the stuff I’ve done is silly. I’ll put the first one up. It’s not technical at all, just explains the beginning of the story, but it shows off what the videos are like.

:smiley:

This sounds like a great idea, it seems like Ember is a bit lacking in the video tutorial department right now (not knocking what’s already out there, but there could be more). If you want any early feedback or help on this let me know, I love educating and might learn something too.

Okay so I put up the first couple of videos…

It’s probably worth mentioning some of the philosophy I’ve tried to take while creating them:

  1. They should be incredibly short so they can fit into our busy schedule.
  2. They should be interesting - when I watch one, I should be interested to watch the next.
  3. Teaching complicated stuff should be shown though example and in context. When we were younger we learnt to write stories but only once we’d read a great many stories already. This should be how we learn, as well.
  4. The solutions for things should be illustrated through the problems that they solve. This one’s tricky, but it means not skipping any steps… so not jumping immediately into showing how templating works without first illustrating the annoyance that they assuage. This one is a huge one for me. It’s very hard to explain to someone new why they should be using a templating system if they’ve never felt the pain of not having used one.

Because of the above, I started with simple, plain HTML. My aim is to get to Ember through building a series of simple sites and their natural progression for an imaginary client. As the client wants more and more on their site, Simple HTML becomes too tedious to maintain and so we introduce Ember as a means of building reuse and greater functionalty into a site.

I also maintain that it’s good to show simple examples in context a few times before explaining what’s going on.

There’s a lot more I could say, but I’m pretty tired and a bit sick at the moment, so I’ll just put the links up to the first few videos that I’ve done.

This is the first one:

This is the second:

and this is the third:

4 Likes

Well it’s been a couple of days. I think perhaps it might be better if I just go ahead and make some more. I don’t think there’s any point to charging for them. I’d rather there was some good stuff around for Ember anyway.

I love making them, so I’ll just keep making them in my spare time. What I might do eventually is when I’ve created quite a few, and hopefully shown where I’m going and there’s a bit more interest, is to do like Ryan Bates did with his Railscast series: do some “pro” ones, and do them about little bits and pieces that fill a particular need or answer a particular question that’s often seen in the community.

Any feedback at all is very welcome!

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have you seen Ember.js Fundamentals | Pluralsight

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Ah yes, I checked that out pronto upon it being released. We can never have enough of videos like those, they are by far the best way I (and others I’m sure) can learn.

The more I think about this kind of thing, the more I really like the idea of it being mostly free like ryan bates screencasts, with a paid option so that community can support it. I really should get back to doing them, it’s just without it being paid I can’t really justify spending time on it at the moment. Chicken and egg scenario!

@JulianLeviston How about a kickstarter, if make a few sample tutorial videos then outline a list of videos you will produce with the same quality you can raise money to invest your time creating the tutorial content.

2 Likes

Yeah, I did consider this, however if the audience isn’t even 100 people (judging based on the number of likes), then I can’t see there being much point in going to the trouble of creating a kickstarter for it…

Is that logical? Have I missed something obvious like the fact that most ember devo don’t come here?

I think it’s quite possible that my ideas and their effectiveness won’t be obvious until the tenth (or so) video, because I don’t start directly with ember…

I think doing a kickstarter for generating community videos and tutorials (thinking RailsApps here) I’d be in for 50$

I removed those videos because they were of too low quality.

Also, I asked the community to like the post if they wanted more things like that and I got about 18 likes total, so it wasn’t enough, really. However, I think that’s probably commensurate with the quality of the videos, as there were 1400 people who viewed this post, so that’s something. There’s obviously some interest there.

I have some other ideas around this that have been percolating.

Hello Julian! Please, write if you actually continued creating Ember tutorials. I would really like to take a look. I’m sure Ember is awesome, but after Ember 2.0 release have not had a chance to work with it (all my projects were on Ember 1.8.1). I’ve tried to use official guide, but it is bad, very bad (for Ember 1.x it was better on my opinion). Thank you