Ask HN: Would you watch Infrastructure/DevOps Screencasts?

I've found that many of my colleagues are eager to learn more about modern infrastructure techniques. In an effort to become more full-stack and better support some of our apps in production. This is especially true of developers arriving via Code Schools rather than from a traditional CS background.

Topic Ideas:

  * Docker/Containerisation (ECS)
  * Service Discovery (Etcd, Serf, Consul)
  * Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible etc.)
  * Monitoring techniques
  * Capacity planning
  * Security best practices

There doesn't seem to be much out there addressing this "need", except https://sysadmincasts.com/ which seems abandoned these days.

Would this kind of screencast be of interest to anyone? I'm thinking I could charge a subscription fee for it. Small bite size lessons. Any further thoughts or topic ideas?

Thanks!

Hey, Justin from https://sysadmincasts.com/ here. Ah, not abandoned just hard to find time. It was taking about 2-3 hours per minute of video if you include all the researching and editing. After joining Docker I just did not have any spare time. Want to get back to it eventually.. one day :) It was incredibly rewarding building something that people find useful and I still get emails every few days from people.. saying "Thanks!". If you go down this road -- at least there is that! It also opened lots of doors. In that a resume was almost irrelevant. So, having said all that, you cannot really go too wrong by helping people, learning new technologies, having doors opened for you, etc. Even if you make no money, like I was (compared to what a company will pay you), you can still do really well.

I created kind of a checklist of things that made the site somewhat successful @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837727.

Some personal thoughts if you go down this path. It take a long time to build a following (think 1+ years). Make sure you get RSS feed & email list going from day one (this was a big selling point). I went down the subscription path and was making about $1-2k/month (at $14/month). That was after spending a year putting in 60 hour weeks. Transcripts and diagrams came in really handy in driving traffic to the site. Google was really helpful in building a following. Not saying it cannot be done just that you need to really love what you're doing (in that you'll want to give up before you see a return). Do not skimp on production quality. Having highly edited content with premium audio makes these worth watching (that's the differentiator from other content). Just watch railscasts.com and you will instantly see that quality vs some random youtube videos.

Burnout can also be a real thing here. You paint yourself into somewhat of a corning, in that you are charging a monthly free, for something that requires creative juices. I found there to be real pressure to produce new and exciting content, but what if it is not polished enough or up to your production quality control bar? Might be a good idea to have somewhat of a backlog so that you fall back on in the event you have writers block. I had a few episode, where I just could not write for a couple weeks, or the content was just not up to my production standards yet. You'll also find that as you progress into writing something, you'll think of a much better way to tell the story, then you'll want to re-write on a tight timeline. It was brutal having to produce on a timeline like that.

Feel free to ping me (email in profile) if you have any questions, want to chat, or need advice.

I'm interested

You know what is more important for a infrastructure/devops engineer, previously simply called "sysadmin"? Understanding several compilers and interpreters (and actually learning several programming languages). Unix C API (fork(), exec(), file descriptors, pipes, sockets, and others). Understanding how services daemonize and how they log. Learning how packaging systems work, how to build a new package, and how to install it. Learning what can be read/detected about the system and what does this information mean. Learning how does the networking work (address configuration, resolver, routing, firewall, packet inspection). Traditional networking helpers, along with several protocols carried out by hand. NSS and PAM, and how the accounts work. And many, many more basic things.

I've never seen anybody understanding the basics, who would have any trouble picking up anything that was a fad in the last ten years from its documentation directly. On the other hand, I've seen Docker or Ansible fanboys that couldn't unify accounts across dozen servers in a sensible way, despite their "modern automation" tools.

And screencasts are the second most useless way of conveying technical material (the top one being podcasts). You can't skim through the material, you can't search it, you can't copy-paste it, you can't print its fragments, it's inherently hard to navigate.