YouTube - Victor Huynh

Reflection – putting YouTube on the backburner

2021-10-022021-10-02

As a follow-up to my previous post, I feel like I could be spending my time better working on my portfolio now (land the job earlier, spend more time learning and applying fundamentals), vs. putting my knowledge into video form. In my previous post, I had wanted to do the following:

Blogging – this is a good form of self reflection and sharing my progress
Technical skills – doing daily problems is maintainable
~~Knowledge gains~~
Portfolio gains – this extends into Knowledge gains; I feel like I should do first and learn next, instead of the other way around
~~Fitness goals~~
Sports goals – this kind of extends fitness goals; I won’t be lifting heavy, but I will be working on bodyweight and skill training
~~YouTube videos~~ – felt like it was taking up too much time, and felt preachy with my current video ideas
~~Social interactions~~ – this was getting to be excessive (although it was one of my earlier goals in the year), cutting down drastically
and Reading – always read

And the ones I’ve crossed out are the ones that I’m putting into lower priority, as I always preach:

Less is more. Do less better.

My main shift will be in the form of Portfolio gains, I will be working on my Liar’s Dice app first and foremost, and will work on trying to deploy it into a shareable form as soon as possible. This will probably be the main thing I will be blogging about in the near future until its completion, and I hope to be able to commit to and and finally complete this (this is probably my 6th attempt or so, from scratch).

Coding Portfolio

Roadblock

2021-09-272021-09-27

Probably one of the things that I’ve been experiencing and struggling with lately, because I really am not sure what the best way to approach things are. This is probably just a self-reflection step, but I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not I should prioritize leveling up my technical, hard skills, or try to land more interviews first, and worry about the technical grind later. In theory, I did save up enough savings to survive and pay rent for half a year, but I’m not sure if I’m willing to deplete that resource during this phase of my life.

Perhaps the best approach would be to do both, but at the same time I’m struggling to prioritize between

Blogging (this is my form of journalling in a sense)
Technical skills (i.e. leetcode, codewars)
Knowledge gains (i.e. reading technical blogs/articles/books)
Portfolio gains (i.e. getting something to show/talk about on my resume)
Fitness goals (i.e. getting to the weight that I want, working on my strength/agility)
Sports goals (i.e. working on my skill, footwork in basketball/volleyball)
YouTube videos (this was especially tough for me because it feels like a lot of work for the least gains)
Social interactions (I’ve largely decided to cut down, because it was a big source of time sink)
and Reading (sometimes I’ve been caught up in doing other stuff that I felt like it was okay to skip reading days)

It’s been a lot to juggle, and I think I need to take a step back and think about what my time allocation and approach should be. It’s definitely been tough, even when I’m not working full-time, especially with a steady stream of rejections coming into my mailbox (lol). It seems like I don’t have enough time on my hands, even though I’ve been trying to maximize my time and efficiency. Interesting predicament.

Learning

Next Steps for October

2021-09-262021-09-26

Whenever I think about creating YouTube comment, it is difficult to think about specific things to be shared. For me, I thought it would be enough getting practice in, and sharing thoughts or thought process, but it seems to be a lot of repetition if I did so. However, I do think that once I start projects, there is probably more room for content and progression tracking. That might be the vibe down the road, but right now I definitely have been putting it off more than I liked. I was struggling with getting enough content to fit under a certain video length, mostly because I dont like the idea of videos that are too long.

Moving forward, for the month of October, I am going to be working on my problem solving skills and language familiarity (JavaScript) as my central focus. I feel like it was a result of unfamiliarity and lack of problem solving preparation that I didn’t land the jobs that I interviewed for during September. On a side note, I think that my time effectiveness is higher overall, but I still find myself getting sidetracked easily, this will be a work in progress as well. I do think that too much social interaction is detrimental for the gains, but there is a certain balance that would promote good growth.

YouTube

First Video uploaded on YouTube

2021-09-072021-09-07

So today, on September 7, 2021, I finally got to uploading my first YouTube video!

It was a relieving experience to finally get my first video uploaded, because I was pretty worried that it wouldn’t turn out the way that I wanted to. However, I feel like it will always have rough beginnings, and I figured I’d do what I could to make the content as short as possible (due to low attention span meta) and straight to the point.

For next steps, I feel like I didn’t really have to do everything in one take (I took many takes, in fact), but there were still times when I would stutter or say something that I didn’t mean to say. I already recorded the screen and it was lined up to my audio/video, so I felt like it was too much of a hassle to edit it out. Next time, I will probably edit the audio/video first, and then fill in the content after – definitely felt like a rookie mistake.

I did feel like the editing software (Camtasia, yes I paid for it) was relatively easy and effective to use. However, I do have a big gripe about it — it does not support Nvidia Broadcast for some reason. I’m not sure if it’ll be a make or break kind of deal, but it does suck that I don’t get extra video sharpening / background blurring because Camtasia refuses to support it.

Overall, I’m excited. It definitely feels like I got some progression in (also got a blog post out on the same day) and am eager to keep it going and see what I can come out with.