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Comment by chpmrc | Hacker News Reader

Writing seems to be the single best thing you can do as a professional, in other areas as well. I know people who were hired because of a single Medium article that got a lot of traction (and made that person sort of a reference in the industry). What do you think about videos? I see lifestyle channels for devs and tech workers taking off but do you think there's a chance the same might happen for more technical channels as well? I find technical videos (like talks or tutorials) to be far more engaging than articles but I'm afraid I'm part of a very small minority.

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Forced pace is a huge problem for videos. If you encounter a paragraph that you already know all about in an article, you can skip it. If you encounter a section of a video like that, it's harder to skip so I'll end up trying to sit through it, getting bored, then distracted, and then who knows what I'll miss.

The 'killer feature' of writing is the ability to self-pace. To me that makes them orders of magnitude more effective as a means of communicating ideas.

I'm in the same boat. But I noticed a lot of my developer co-workers prefer video's. Especially the younger generation (I'm 41).

Written materials can also be used as reference much more easily. You can't ctr+f a video to look for the specific nugget of information you need.

For self-pacing videos, this chrome plugin is VERY useful. You can watch videos at 2x, 2.2x, or any other increment of 0.1x: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

It depends on how the video is structured. You should divide a video into sections and index them the same way you would with a book.

The killer feature of video is to bring in multiple pages of connected concepts and quickly tie them together, along with emotional emphasis.

The lack of Ctrl-F too! Although maybe that’s a fixable problem with transcribed videos

Personal opinion on video v/s text channel. While watching a video, I have to follow a linear path, I can't skip much incase I miss some context. On the other hand, its easier to skim written content.

I have very little experience with making videos, but some of my interview subjects do! Chris on Code makes great technical videos and livestreams. There is a bit of information specific to video in the book, but I think the information about the planning, outlining, and editing of technical content would be helpful to people making video.

Scriptwriting is just a particular form of writing, so any process you've developed would work whether someone is writing technical tutorials for video or sonnet form. :D

Funny you should mention sonnets, Chapter 8 develops an example technical tutorial on generating sonnets by remixing Shakespeare's work.

That's what inspired me. :) I'm really curious to read this.

It might just be a problem with me, but I think that the level of articulation that a book can offer is way higher than what a video could. A book is written down, read, edited, and thoughtfully compiled, with the possibility of new editions coming out regularly. With a video this is less easy to do unless you want to keep re-recording.

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