What am I building and How long will it take? (Format and Deadlines)

[00:00 - 00:17] Okay, this section is for format and deadlines, aka, what am I building and how long will it take? So the idea here is I want to tell you about just our format and how long it's going to take and what is this thing that you're actually building.

[00:18 - 00:31] So first things first is like our format is we have lessons and modules. So you can think of a module as like a chapter and a lesson is like one web page.

[00:32 - 00:40] And so on our website, let me pull it up here. So here for example is the full stack D3 course on the website.

[00:41 - 00:53] And we first have these different modules over here with different lessons built in. And then there each lesson is a single web page and a single video.

[00:54 - 01:06] So a lesson is going to be somewhere around, I guess that works out to about 500,000 words. And the video is going to be maybe five to 10 minutes, but not really longer than that.

[01:07 - 01:18] You want it to comfortably fit on one web page. And the idea with the new line format is actually that you could get almost all of the information or a good amount of it from reading the manuscript.

[01:19 - 01:21] So we write the code first. We talked about this in an early lesson.

[01:22 - 01:32] You write the code, keep a stream of consciousness of your notes. And then we write the manuscript, which is going to be markdown files.

[01:33 - 01:37] And these are generated from markdown files. And you embed the code in there.

[01:38 - 01:49] And then from there we'll record the video afterwards and put it in. So that's how our format works is there's like modules, which is like a chapter and lessons which are our web page.

[01:50 - 01:52] Okay, so how long is it going to take? Right?

[01:53 - 01:54] That's a question a lot of people have. How long is going to take me to do this?

[01:55 - 01:57] Are there any deadlines? Okay, there are no.

[01:58 - 02:17] There's not, you know, right this second there's not necessarily a hard deadline though we should kind of work to try to try to agree on some. But typically our most successful authors are able to complete these in about three to three months.

[02:18 - 02:27] So if you look at the first version of full stack D three by Amelia was done in about three months. The first version of full stack view was also done in about three months.

[02:28 - 02:34] That feels like the right amount of time. Pretty much everybody who is creating these courses they already have another job as you know, probably a programmer.

[02:35 - 02:47] And so this is happening on nights and weekends. And you know, I think that for me it takes about 20 hours to create a module's worth of work.

[02:48 - 02:52] So that would be like I have the outline and know what I'm going to do. And I'm trying to, and I'm writing the code.

[02:53 - 02:57] I'm writing the manuscript. I'm making sure it's good.

[02:58 - 03:05] And then recording a video like getting it down if I need any editing. I can basically do one module in about 20 hours worth of work.

[03:06 - 03:10] So for our authors, you know, we try to set a goal in the early days. It's like ship.

[03:11 - 03:17] Can you ship an hour per month? And when I say an hour, right, it's like an hour worth of video plus all of like the models in the code.

[03:18 - 03:22] So there's a lot kind of like hidden in that. But yeah, basically an hour a month is doable.

[03:23 - 03:27] And really the first hour is the hardest as you get further along. You're going to find that you go a lot faster, right?

[03:28 - 03:36] Like, you know, of course it takes 30 hours does not take 30 months because of course you get a lot better as you go along. Yeah, aim for an hour per month.

[03:37 - 03:52] So for the like, but of course that depends on like how long your course actually is. So like how long should your course be?

[03:53 - 04:05] So the, you know, how long it should be should be something that you can ship in about that time frame. Yeah, I that's kind of answer that.

[04:06 - 04:14] You know, I think that if it takes six months, like if you start this project and we aim for three months, but it ends up taking you six months, that's okay. Typically you're not blocking anyone else.

[04:15 - 04:17] It's, it's okay. Some life happens and things take a little bit longer.

[04:18 - 04:26] If it takes nine months after about nine months, I think it stops being fun. I think nine months is a long period of time to work here.

[04:27 - 04:28] And I'd say some weekends on it. And it's just a long time.

[04:29 - 04:38] If it takes a year, most people for whom it like takes a year don't actually end up finishing. I would say 50% probably will like if it takes a year, just doesn't happen.

[04:39 - 04:55] So I think you want to try to scope your course into whatever you can accomplish in that shorter month's long time period. So that said, we basically find that courses tend to fall into like different buckets, right?

[04:56 - 05:03] There's like the one to four hour bucket. And then there's like the 10 plus hour bucket, you know, so full stack D three again.

[05:04 - 05:16] And he's like 12 hours, tiny house like 30. At most of the courses that we have on our guides, these are going to be somewhat shorter, maybe like one to four or five hours.

[05:17 - 05:28] So yeah, so how long should your course be? I think it's a good idea to just try to tackle something that's going to be like, let's say three ish hours, if it's longer, it's totally fine with me.

[05:29 - 05:44] You know, people like longer courses, but I think one to three hours is totally fine. What you really want to do, right, is bite off something that you can actually ship and you can actually finish and you can get out in the world and have people like learn from it and benefit from it.

[05:45 - 05:52] And yeah, so how long it should be is something that you can actually finish in a short amount of time, which is maybe like three to four months.