I've been using relational databases for years, but my conceptual understanding was never that strong. I hadn't touched MySQL in particular for several years. Your course not only got me back up to speed, but I learned a lot of things I'd never known before.
I love how you organize your lessons, how you make sure to answer the right questions at the right times, and how you prioritize helping the learner build a strong mental model.
I hope you make more content like this in the future.
And even then, you have a lot of extra external motivation (money, peer pressure, boss) to keep pushing when you’d otherwise give up.
Not to say that the satisfaction is any less, but the environment seems different.
Let's take one not related to software at all! I turned a shed into an office over the course of many months: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1333866090573811723. I wanted to give up and burn it down at some points, but I powered through and ended up with the perfect shedquarters!
I also did a podcast many years ago that was hard for me to produce, but I powered through until I felt like it had reached its natural conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzr2Hd6Uscin....
I created a course teaching college students financial accounting that's made over 100k in the 5 or 6 years it's been live (http://acct229.com). That was a freakin grind that I thought about quitting a lot.
I also started doing tech YouTube videos recently and each one is a tiny exercise in finishing (and it feels great to ship!): https://www.youtube.com/@aarondfrancis/videos?view=0&sort=p&...
I wrote and released an open source package called Sidecar (https://github.com/hammerstonedev/sidecar) for managing Lambda functions from Laravel. That led to me speaking at Laracon Online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rq-yHAwYjQ) and also to being asked to produce a course for Laracasts (https://youtu.be/0Rq-yHAwYjQ?t=11759). Speaking at the first Laracon led to speaking at the second Laracon Online (https://youtu.be/f4QShF42c6E?t=21744). Both of these led to me being profiled by GitHub's ReadME project at https://github.com/readme/stories/aaron-francis. (The shedquarters is featured here!)
That interview led to another piece called "Publishing your work increases your luck" at https://github.com/readme/guides/publishing-your-work. I gave a talk on that article at GitHub Universe. That article led to... this article. And here we are!
Each of these things have 1) felt awesome to release and 2) directly increased my luck, my bank account, or led to the next thing.
Hope those examples hit home a little harder!
They’re certainly done outside of work and make the point a lot better ;)
Shed looks fun! Now if only I had the space for it. Think 20x10 covers my entire garden.