Destroy All Software screencasts free this week | Hacker News Reader

Destroy All Software screencasts free this week

destroyallsoftware.com

277 pointspvsukale324 comments

Nice quality content, I'll definitely take advantage of the free period. The cost to sign up seems very high for what this is though. I expected a one time cost, or maybe $5 or so a month. $290 annually seems expensive for a single format of lessons from a single teacher. Even the current promotion seems onerous. As a point of comparison, Safari Books Online does sales for $199 annually just about every year and has content from countless instructors in many formats, including live training. Perhaps I'm missing some information, as I only read the sale page before viewing content.

Not posting this to complain. I'd really like to see quality content like this reach more eyes, and I hate to see the author shoot themselves in the foot by putting up such a high barrier to access it. It's entirely possible I'm just not aware of the costs that go into creating this content.

The cost to produce quality content is quite high. Even if you are "only" putting together a screencast, the cost of learning that content, planning how to teach it, editing it, and inevitable retakes can all easily stretch to 20x the length of a video. I'd call that estimate fairly optimistic, to be honest, it can go much higher.

To use an example I'm familiar with: Code School courses took about 6 or so hours to complete (including challenges), but take 4-6 months of effort by an average of 4 people at any given time to create. We tried many times to tighten that timeline up, but being too aggressive inevitably resulted in a course we weren't 100% happy with.

Pricing isn't as obvious as it seems, as well. We raised our prices from 25/mo to 29/mo ages ago, which was a large net positive for the company from a revenue standpoint. We ran pricing tests a few times, as well, and anything below 29/mo performed much worse overall (we didn't get enough extra signups at a lower cost to break even). Sales & free weekends have a big impact, though.

As I've watched the space coalesce it seems like the very successful companies will be the ones that create some kind of "degree" (accreditation doesn't matter, only how much the community trusts them) for individuals, or companies that chase down enterprises for continuing education dollars. Or both. Both tend to charge a premium over that 290/yr price point, which you need to in order to be wildly successful due to the massive churn in the education space.

All that to say, from my perspective, $290 a year is very reasonable, and is probably the right price point.

Source: was the CTO of Code School

Free market will judge the right price. Lots of people put free content out there, some of it pretty good. Not as good as Code School's content, but people have to see the value difference. Just because you put a lot of hours in doesn't mean people will appreciate it and pay more for it.

If I recall, it used to cost $20 or $25 one-off per series (there are 5 legacy series), available to download. It was a very good value.

I love Gary Bernhardt's stuff. As an old customer who already "bought" the 5 series, the incremental value is even lower for me now unfortunately. Nevertheless, I'm really happy that he's back producing those videos.

It is hard to find good CS teachers, because they can make more in industry than they do teaching. It makes sense that a good quality CS teacher with a solid course should cost more than another subject.

"Fun" anecdote on this: long ago, I used to teach Ruby and Rails, professionally. One of my old professors emailed me asking if I'd like to come back and teach as an adjunct for a single course the next semester.

The pay for the entire course was the same as our day rate was in industry.

Of course, as an employee, I wasn't making that day rate personally, but that's how far out of whack it was overall. It's really brutal. I would love to teach, but it doesn't make any economic sense: ironically, part of the reason I need the extra money is that I'm still paying off my student loans!

The private teaching industry does seem to be able to charge a lot of money, e.g. the coding schools and the (human) language schools. It's the research-oriented/public schools that don't have much extra money for teaching or simply don't care.

Some exceptional content on writing tests in the early seasons.

Also a great demonstration of what a very skilled typist can do in vim.

Dunno what's up with the name (being silly I think) but anyway these are well done! Just watched the Malloc From Scratch one: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/mallo...

Borrowed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroy_All_Monsters "a 1968 Japanese science fiction kaiju film featuring Godzilla"

Thanks for linking that. It was great! It was fun to race to follow along as well.

"Now let's run that, aaaaand I've made a mistake."

One of my favorite talks ever is https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

He said Captain, I said...

Oh boy, what a great source of content. Is there a curated list of the best/most popular ones?

edit: ok the sales page has recommendations from the author: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/sale

Personal list of favorites:

Functional Core, Imperative Shell/Boundaries are two versions of the same talk. One of the best talks I have ever seen on software development, articulates some really great concepts about software design. Applicable in so many places.

Sucks/Rocks series: this one is specific to Rails, but if you write Rails, is quite good. Gary doesn't write things the same way that most people write things, and for good reasons. This explains the details. See also "Fast tests with and without Rails", which you can probably generalize to other frameworks fairly easily.

The "stubs and mocks" sections, together, are really good: Gary is a fan of mocking, and many people aren't. He talks a lot about why, and how to properly mock things.

I just watched "malloc from scratch" yesterday and really enjoyed it.

The conference talks are already free, but while you're digging into DAS...

I very much recommend "The Birth and Death of JavaScript". It basically predicted WebAssembly before WebAssembly existed, and is just a really excellent talk regardless of the subject. You'll see why when you watch it.

"Ideology" is also a fantastic talk about things programmers believe and why.

> It basically predicted WebAssembly before WebAssembly existed

I really love that talk, but this is a bit of a stretch considering that it could apply to asm.js as well, which was available the year before the talk was recorded. Remember the unreal engine demo on Firefox?

Yeah, that might be fair. I feel like Wasm is a pretty significant step over asm, and is much closer to the world presented in the talk, but it would also be 100% reasonable to just be talking about asm. Good point.

(I was lucky enough to see the talk live, so the timeline of events gets a little messed up in my head sometimes...)

yes I just stumbled on the boundaries talk and started sucks/rocks. Watched like, 2-3 hours of video this morning already, will be paying for it - its VERY good :)

Thanks for the list

Yep the recommendations are very good. Functional Core, Imperative Shell stands out for me, as well as the Computation series which gave me a very good understanding of lambda calculus stuff, coming from a nearly zero base knowledge.

Wat?

nice pun

Meta: mods please make it "screencasts".

There are enough cats online. :)

This is already a difficult to read title. I think the company name should be cased properly, to at least hint that it is a noun, and possibly make it possessive: Destroy All Software's.

Looks like it's been fixed.

https://http.cat/301

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