I think DIY content is so hard to make. For me, it usually involves building stuff that I find interesting, but that is usually super niche and doesn’t appeal to a mainstream audience. Thus, less views which makes the whole time spent on making the video feel wasted compared to other projects I could be doing.
On the other hand, I could try to build projects that might be more mainstream for the better views, but then I’m spending time creating stuff I don’t want to make.
As a consoomer I find interesting that the production quality has bigger say over which DIY projects I watch than if the thing they are building aligns to my interest. For example JohnnyQ90 is filming himself creating very high quality RC cars from scratch, and despite me not having interest in machining/rc cars I still watch basically all his videos.
Your interest being niche may not matter as much as you may think.
That’s a good point! Though, I would still argue that things like RC cars are more mainstream then a video about building a RISC-V emulator or re-implementing an existing protocol.
You are right. Such concepts are truly abstract, such for illustrations are hard to make. The matches may not be perfect, but examples in this case come to mind:
[0]braintruffle - took the concept of computer fluid simulation as main topic over detailing specific implementation, few videos a year.
[1]Reducible - His explanation of GJK algo, even after reading papers on it, made me appreciate it.
Both utilise extensive animation skills, mastering meaning of video.
People who are interested in DIY are interested in the process far more than the average person. They want to learn techniques on how to build the things they want.
You can't build a Youtube channel by highlighting what you've built. You have to explain how and why it's built the way it was. The end result is maybe 5% of the value.
Wait, why is everyone so distraught about this? Am I missing something? This only affects people who upload their photos to iCloud?
Just don't store any data on iCloud. Seems simple enough. Yeah sure, we can make conspiracy theories and all, but based off of what was officially announced I'm not understanding all the hysteria.
> Work is about finding a meaningful way of living your life, of creating something or giving something you can be proud of. If you just do it for money, you already fell prey for the bad parts of human greed and status games. This has nothing to do with other people.
Thanks for the wisdom! It's encouraging to know that other people have the same thought process but are still able to achieve what they want. It also goes against the whole "one career your whole life" mantra that I hear a lot.
Hmmm....but what if you are "stuck" in a job that pays decently (enough to cover needs) extremely flexible hours and unlimited vacation and awesome work life balance (sometimes less than 40 per week). But the actual work is pointless and boring. Is that time for a change?
Some people say yes, but often these are the people who are the "high achieving" tech workaholics who love to go home and code for fun.
Other people say no, and these are often the people who don't really care much about work and just look at it to a means to an end.
I think it depends. Will staying in the position mean I will be ready to face the job market with a possible job loss years down the road?
Personally, I would judge whether I still have opportunities to learn. If not with the projects I'm directly involved, do I have the autonomy to pursue workplace improvements and ways to keep learning at work?
Caveat is that I'm also very early in my career and while I highly value work life balance, which was part of what led me to change careers from semiconductors into software, I probably skew more towards achieving than not.
Only you know the right balance for you. That might be a dream job, or it might be miserable.
I would say if you are in that situation and enjoy it, you should still be learning and investing in yourself outside of work whether that's learning code or practicing your baking. Learning and struggling with new material is basically a muscle and needs to be an ongoing practice, even if it's not directly related to your day to day.
Some people prefer to learn at work. Some people prefer to learn in their free time.
If you are the type that learns at work, then having nothing to learn at your work means you have nothing to learn. If you are the type that learns at home, not coming home exhausted from your work means you can learn more.
Truth is, in most of the tech companies you can find something wrong with the tech or it can get boring pretty quickly. Probably, only the biggest and/or most innovative ones have something really interesting to offer learning/career wise.
If you are a web dev, most of the time you are gonna deal with MVC and similar patterns that you're gonna reuse daily. It's obvious that it gets dull. And when you hear about a new toy that you haven't used yet? You get excited and you want to change a job to get to work with it. But guess what? You are gonna get bored with the new toy after a few months too.
Programming is pretty repetitive and most of the problems aren't that challenging after a few years of experience.
Honestly, you might be better off getting involved in non-tech ways. That's often where most of the help is needed. I do manage a website for my party but it's very hands-off WordPress style.
How do you propose finding those real problems to solve? I know that every problem I encounter in my life (or work) has already been solved 100 times over.
If I were to start again, I would look outside of my tech bubble. Go see a local workshop, baker, restaurant. Look into niche industries. There are plenty of inefficiencies and unsolved problems there. I think the best ones are where you deal with physical things (e.g. not just advertising or getting customers).
There are plenty of unsolved problems.
An alternative is to look for a problem that has been "solved", but not in a certain niche. For example, inventory control and tracking production seems to be a "solved" problem, but it turned out it wasn't a "solved" problem for small/medium-scale electronics manufacturing, which is the niche I'm in.
Yeah in honestly shocked at how many niche problems. I encounter that have ready solutions. If I ever find a truly unsolved problem, in likely to assume that its just too hard to properly solve at the time.
Why do you think you need to find a truly unsolved problem? If all you want is a profitable, sustainable business, look at what companies are already paying for, and build a product that solves one of those problems. It doesn't have to be a carbon copy of an existing product. You can differentiate by price or combination of features. Or you can target a different niche. Competition is a signal that there's money to be made in the market.
It won't be easy, and you will have to learn sales & marketing. But it is doable. If there are X companies in the market, there's likely a place for another one (as long as this isn't a winner-takes-all type of market).
Just find a pain point. One of my products sells just because people really don't like certain aspects of my biggest competitor. So I capitalize on that and make migration easy.
So solve it for the 101st time, but better. Everything is broken and nothing works. So, build something that isn't broken and does work.
I just found out yesterday that AWS Amplify doesn't have a manual deploy button. It's only job is to build and deploy an app and there is nowhere on Amplify itself where you can press a button and kick off a build! Junk like this is everywhere now. It's a golden opportunity for people who know what they're doing.
On the other hand, I could try to build projects that might be more mainstream for the better views, but then I’m spending time creating stuff I don’t want to make.