¶The Future of System Crafters
I love making content and engaging with this community. I want to do even better!
Let’s have a discussion about a few different areas where I might be able to improve.
For each area I’ll suggest some ideas and I’d love to hear your thoughts on each one. Suggest anything that you don’t see there!
¶What’s the best way to present video content?
- Split up series into shorter videos (15 min) focusing on a more narrow aspect of the topic
- Shorter high-level videos with more detailed show notes?
- Don’t change anything!
- Something else? Any examples of other channels that do it well?
- Shorter getting started videos, longer advanced config video
- Setting the context better at the beginning of the video
- Check out egghead.io templates
¶What’s the best use of live streams?
- Community discussions around a topic
- Going more in-depth on the week’s video topic
- Interviews with package authors and other interesting people (even multiple talking about the same topic, sharing workflows)
- Live coding
- Workflow demos
- More live streams?
- Community-suggested topics, what’s cool this week
- Live coding with the purpose of showing workflow
- Pair programming and discussion
- Live preparation for videos
- Talking about Emacs News
- Live-coding Guix packages suggested by viewers
¶What other forms of content would you be interested in?
- Books that go more in-depth
- Full video courses, possibly with exercises
- Podcast
- Newsletter
- Comparison videos like Ivy vs Vertico vs Selectrum, etc
- Short feature-focused videos to get people interested in Emacs
¶What other topics would you be interested in?
- Learning programming languages
- More focus on using Emacs for personal productivity (Org Mode, Org Roam)
- Discussing other tools outside of Emacs / Lisp space
- Game streaming
- Shell programming, but maybe with things like Babashka, Guile, Elisp, etc
- Window managers - StumpWM
- Getting better at scripting/automating your system
- Talking about my streaming/recording setup
- Learning how to read Emacs package code
- Keyboard-specific material like QMK, kmonad
- Prog langs like Nim, Crystal, Zig, Scheme, things that are more obscure
- Antipatterns in Emacs config
- Explaining the “emacs model”
- Book reviews and discussions
- Contributing to Emacs or Guix
¶What do you think would make it worthwhile to become a sponsor?
- Sponsor-only content like behind the scenes, prep streams
- Special member activities (book club, weekly discussions, learning projects)
- Being more of a community-within-the-community
- “Free” merch (stickers, etc)
- Different sponsorship platform? Liberapay, subscribestar
- Better pubnix
- Code review
¶What are some good ways to fund the channel long term?
- Sponsorship / membership
- Paid content like books or courses
- Merchandise (t-shirts, stickers, mugs, etc)
- Hands-on learning events
- Something else you’re not getting that would be valuable?