Steve talks with Adam Jahr of Vue Mastery about online Vue training. They talk about the history of Vue Mastery, how it is structured, and the details of what goes into making the fantastic, professional-looking videos they create.

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Hello everybody, welcome to yet another thrilling episode of Views on View. I am Steve Edwards, the host with the face for radio and the voice for being a mime, but I'm still your host. Today I'm flying solo on the panel and with me, I have a name that is well known in the view training community, Adam Jar of View Mastery. How you doing Adam? Adam Jar, View Mastery, View Mastery, View Mastery, View Mastery, View Mastery, View Mastery, View Mastery,

 

I'm doing well, thanks for having me.

 

You sure? With that cough there, I wasn't sure if you were doing well or not.

 

I had just taken a sip of hot coffee, so we're caffeinated and we're good.

 

Coffee needed, I like that, that's good. And then also before we move on any further, I'd like to welcome in our studio audience. Okay, thank you audience. It's always nice to have them. They don't make a lot of sound dearing, but

 

Yeah.

 

it's the moral support I know that I appreciate when I'm recording these

 

big

 

podcasts.

 

crowd today.

 

Huge, huge. So as I mentioned, Adam Jar is well known in the Vue community for his Vue Mastering and the training that he provides there with Greg Pollock. And so as I've mentioned in previous episodes recently, probably about, it was released back in April or May if I remember, I did. a very basic course on Nux 3, just getting up and going with Nux 3. I think it was called Intro to Nux 3 or I forget what it was titled now that I think about it. But,

 

Nox 3 Essentials.

 

nah, there you go. It was an essential course. Thank you. And so I worked quite a bit with Adam and his crew on the creation of that video, of that course. And so I thought I'd bring Adam on to... just to talk about that and what's involved in what he does and how he does it because they make some really awesome videos. Now in the past we've had Greg Pollack, his partner in crime, on here and I will put links to that episode in the show notes. Greg, to this day, I still say Greg has the smoothest voice of anybody I've heard in a training video. It's like butter.

 

Yep, definitely a voice for radio for sure.

 

Yes, exactly. Yes, unlike mine. But anyway, so before we get going and into all of you, Master, why don't you give us some background on yourself, Adam, who you are, why you're famous, what your development and training history is, and then we'll delve into the nitty gritty.

 

Sure. Yep, so I'm Adam Jarr. I am the co-founder of View Mastery. So we strive to be the ultimate learning resource for view developers, providing them really everything they need to succeed in their field, whether they're seeking to level up their career, maybe they're seeking a promotion, or maybe they're coming from either vanilla JavaScript, fresh out of code school, something like that. And they're looking for a streamlined way to get up to a professional level of view skills. And that's what our platform provides for people. And so my background is in education training. We've had this company we started up in 2017 and have been growing it and building up the platform ever since and before that I was a part of an in-person coding coding boot camp, so Had a lot of kind of on the ground Experiencing people going from really zero to hero so to speak where maybe they're in the service industry or in education or wherever their background was, we took them from that place of pretty much knowing nothing about programming and getting them up to the point that they could be hireable as a junior level developer. So that was a really key part of my experience professionally of really seeing what it takes to educate people, kind of seeing where people's maybe... roadblocks are the common areas that people have confusion around. And so I always apply that empathy to not make assumptions about what people may or may not know and kind of have that as a common denominator whenever I'm producing content in the back of my head, especially the the really fundamental essential content with keeping that experience in mind. So yeah, so that's kind of where I come from and and where we're going is we're continuing to make the platform of benefit to the existing subscribers and anyone else who decides to join us in the months and years to come. Always producing content on really the latest topics. For example, when Vuex switched over to become Pinya, we started producing Pinya content right away and we do that really with anything. So... Yeah, that's that's where we're at. Hey Steve, I'm gonna stop you. I'm not getting your audio.

 

Edit, it helps if I turn on my microphone. Let's try that again. I was muted. I was muted to make sure I don't get any background

 

Oh, okay.

 

sound while you're talking, and then I forgot to turn it on. OK, here we go, out of the edit. So you went into detail there about your training background and how much you've done training and your education and so on. How much of a developer background do you have? Have you worked for an agency or done side project or worked for large companies? What's that like?

 

So yeah, so I've done some like freelancing work, but I've actually never worked for a company as a developer beyond the development work that I've done for like within the roles of my education profession. So in other words, I've built things that were necessary within those roles in terms of web apps, and also built every web app for the courses that we've built. But my experience, really starts and hones in on the education part of it, and really developing that refined approach to creating content that is simple to digest, but also gets you there quicker. What I found is that a lot of people think that producing a lot of content is the kind of key to success, and that's part of it, but. The bigger part is producing the right kind of content that gets people to their end goals as quickly and smoothly as possible. And I think that's kind of the secret sauce that we're probably gonna touch on and unpack here in this episode of kind of how to bake that cake. But yeah, that's been really my focus throughout my career is to create the highest quality content that gets people to their professional goals as simply and swiftly. as possible.

 

Yeah, well, I suppose that's true for any business, right? If you're making stuff that nobody wants, then you're not gonna really be very successful.

 

Mm-hmm

 

You know, whether you're selling goods or services or training or whatever, that's for sure. Now, I know that, side note, you guys, you and Greg used to do the View News podcast. It was

 

We

 

a little,

 

did,

 

what,

 

yeah.

 

five, 10 minute roundup of news. Because I know I used to listen to it all the time. You quit doing that a while ago, am I right?

 

Yeah, we quit a number of years ago, but when we first started, so we did it for a couple of years. It was a weekly podcast where we really did kind of a roll up of the week's biggest news in the Vue community. So we focused on maybe updates to libraries and plugins, new releases. We also focused on different articles and kind of approaches and best practices that we were noticing and kind of summed that all up in about five to 10 minutes. Each week over time we we did stop doing that and we focused a little more on on the the blog content and the video content we found that that was a bit more value to to the community ultimately

 

Right. So one of the questions I always have, and this isn't a long topic, is just business models of

 

Mm-hmm.

 

people like this. So you get places like, say, Udemy or something where you can buy courses as a one-off versus subscription services. So View Mastery is like a subscription, right? You pay a monthly or yearly fee, and then you have access to all the content

 

Exactly,

 

as

 

yep.

 

it becomes available, right?

 

Yep, we've got three different subscription plans. So we have monthly, we have annual, and then we have also teams. So we have a lot of companies who either are using Vue or starting to use Vue or contemplating using Vue who come on as a team. So yeah, so that's where we're a recurring revenue subscription-based learning platform.

 

But at the same time, not everything is locked behind a paywall. I know for instance, you'll put some stuff on YouTube, right? Like a teaser, a first episode for a course or even make them available. The intro one's available on your platform for someone to see, right? Sort of entice them and say, Hey, this looks interesting. I want to pony up and get a membership here.

 

Yeah, so we definitely have a bunch of free content, and the reason behind that is twofold. One, it's great content, not to pat ourselves too hardly on the back, but we want to share the work that we're doing, and especially with that intro content. So a lot of our intro courses and also the first two lessons of every course, regardless of if it's fundamentals or advanced, they're all free for people to consume. And that... has always been true and will always be true. So whether that is stuff that we repost over on YouTube or if it's internally on our platform, over at VueMastery.com, you can watch all of the initial two lessons of the course for free. So point one is we just like to get our brand out there, get our content out there, give people, especially with that intro content, you know, our Intro to Vue 3 course is fully free. We like to give people that... starting place for free. And then if you want to commit beyond that, of course, that functions as an enticement, as you say, into becoming a paid subscriber if the way that we teach resonates with the way that you learn. If you're into high quality video content, if you appreciate maybe visual animations that help reinforce concepts, that's really our approach. And again, we do so in a... in a more succinct way so you still get the same value as you might in a kind of more longer drawn out video that you'd find somewhere else, but the quality and the edit and the pre-planning is done in such a way that you can get that same value in a much shorter time. I think you're still on mute.

 

I've gotta quit doing that. Okay, so I've noticed on your site that you also, and I've seen this when I've searched, is you also have view conference videos, like View Comp,

 

Yup.

 

Connect.Tech. I don't think you have like sole license to publish these because these are all also on YouTube. Is that correct or am I mistaken?

 

So I think it would depend on the specific conference. So we have over the, since 2018, over the years, amassed a collection of conference videos. So I think we're actually the biggest collection of VIEW conference videos on the internet. So you can find that all on the conference tab of VIEWmastery.com. But we have essentially accumulated those by becoming sponsors over the years of those conferences. And so we essentially become the video sponsor. of conference xyz. We do a lot of work with ViewConf US and we go to View Amsterdam and you mentioned ConnectTech and we go to View Toronto so we definitely have a number of those conference talks and and we do republish them over on on YouTube as well to yeah to share the knowledge really.

 

So they're not part of a subscription, they're just available with anybody who comes to the site then.

 

Yeah, none of them are behind a paywall, so you wouldn't have to have a paid subscription to watch them. Of course, if you have a paid subscription, that is part of the platform, but you could watch them entirely for free.

 

Awesome. OK, so let's talk about the growth of your organization. So you and Greg were the initial partners. Is that how it started out?

 

Yep, exactly. So it's definitely started out with, with he and I, and we started out with, so for people who might not know who Greg is or what his history is, he started codeschool.com back in the day and, and built that up to be the best place to, to learn a bunch of different programming languages. And I think how he would describe it as like the best way to start learning. programming language X, whether that's Python or Ruby or whatnot. He actually has a big history in Ruby on Rails, creating the Rails for Zombies course, which I actually have come across a number of courses over the years now that's like... taking that same model, I was just looking at a smart contract course, I think it was a solidity course, solidity for zombies, but he's had quite the impact on the tech education space and so we took everything he learned and we wanted to apply that into a new learning platform and kind of combine forces and me bring kind of my in-person coding boot camp experience to the table. We looked at a number of emerging technologies, and again, this was 2017 at the time, so we were comparing kind of metrics of a number of them. And at the end of the day, View seemed like the best choice, and that's essentially the horse that we bet on, so to speak, and it's turned out to be a winner. It's only continued to grow over the years, and not only grow in terms of its adoption and popularity, but also... the ecosystem and the strength and quality of the libraries within it. And so we're very happy with the choice that we made and our full devotees to the Vue ecosystem.

 

So side note being the geek that I am, I'm just curious what platform is your site built on? What do you use for backend? I dare ask, is it view on the front end?

 

It is Vue

 

Right.

 

and it's specifically Nuxt that we're using. And on the backend we're using, Firebase is our backend.

 

Okay. All right. So then, okay, so you started out obviously with the two of you. Then as you've grown along, obviously people like me came in, you've got people doing courses from you. How was that growth? How did that happen? Was it fast? Did it take a while before you finally got some traction, and then people started coming? Because you obviously have courses from Evan Yu, who knows a thing or two about Vue.

 

Yeah, yeah.

 

and some other core people, I believe. So how does that all work? Or how did that grow? And then how does it work now?

 

Yeah, so at the beginning it was Greg and myself producing the content, whether we were producing our own courses or teaming up to do a course together. And then as we continue to build the brand and build our audience, we got, you know, more and more eyes on our content. And we also got interest in other creators or people who wanted to start partnering with us who You know, you mentioned Evan. Earlier on, we also partnered with some core team members like Damian Dulis. And so that was kind of an incremental process of as we built the brand online, as we built our social platforms, as we attended in-person conferences, we just started to build that network and find interesting people who had stuff to offer our subscribers. And whether we partnered with, for example, Ben Hong was one of our earlier instructors. And with him, we taught him our entire process. And so he is very independent in terms of producing content and has taken our process and put a spin on it. And he's creating some of my favorite content on the platform. And... So there's people like that who we kind of said, here's this week long training, you know, a bootcamp so to speak on how, what is the view mastery way of producing content and have partnered with him and people like him ever since. And then there's other aspects where we kind of plug into experts like for example, when we do content with Evan, it's not like we're asking him to build animation sequences like we would internally. We might layer that on, on top of what he is doing, but we focus his time on providing his expertise in the best, most fluid way that he knows how, and we kind of add our secret sauce on top of that.

 

Right. So just by way of backstory, the way I came to work for you is through a post on View Jobs.

 

Yeah, yeah.

 

If I remember correctly, I happened to be looking one day. It's not something I look at every day, but I happened to look and I said, oh, that sounds interesting. And so I had done some conference talks and stuff before, but hadn't really done any video training.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And so if I remember correctly, you asked us to send you a demo video. And so I whipped up something with MonoSnap and I did a, I still have the project saved, I think, where I created a quick view front end that queried the Dad Joke API. I think it's called ICANN has Dad Joke

 

Mm-hmm.

 

and displayed a random Dad Joke, but which obviously which you were more interested in wasn't the finished product as much as how I taught, right? And how I explain things. And so... The email I got from you was, hey, you seem like a quote unquote natural explainer. I was like, oh, okay, cool, I like

 

Uh huh.

 

that.

 

Yep.

 

And

 

Yep.

 

we went from there. And you know, for me, that's something I've always been pretty good at is breaking down, taking a fuzzy topic and breaking it down into detail so that people can understand it. But I was curious, do you get many other people through that

 

I

 

ViewJobs

 

was curious, did

 

posting,

 

you get many other

 

or

 

people through that New Jobs

 

has it

 

posting,

 

mostly been

 

or

 

just sort of a word

 

has it mostly

 

of mouth,

 

been just sort of a word of mouth?

 

you know, networking

 

You

 

type of thing?

 

know networking type of thing. I'm gonna respond in a second. I need to reconnect my headphones. Hold on. Edit, edit, edit, edit.

 

Edit, edit, edit, edit.

 

Okay, can you talk?

 

Yeah, can you hear me?

 

Okay, okay, cool. So the question was like, did I get other responses

 

Yeah.

 

from the

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah, so I did get a number of responses. You were actually the one person that was chosen to make the course. So

 

Oh,

 

kudos

 

interesting.

 

to you. And yeah, so what... It's funny that you remember my specific feedback to you, but that was true. It was what I look for when I look in, whether it's for a blog writer or an actual full course creator, is someone who is at the core an explainer who goes step by step. who has that empathy and really has the heart and mind to be an educator. And I think maybe some people think, oh, I'm a really great developer, I should start producing content and then they'll produce content that makes a bunch of assumptions and doesn't really address incrementally how to do something and maybe shows the how, but not the why. And I think that's the biggest error that people make when they produce content is they'll. they'll say, okay, well repeat after me. And then you watch the video and you said, well, I repeated after you, but now I'm kind of helpless unless I need to do this exact same situation. I don't, you know, it's the old idiom of you can, you know, you can give a man a fish or you can teach a man a fish. And that's really what true education is about, obviously. And that is best accomplished when you. interweave the how with the why so that you can make people independent and self-sufficient when when they finish your videos and they can apply that and map that over to their use cases. And so that's what I identified in you. I identified that core explainer aspect of you and it's probably something you've you've developed over years of whether it's like mentoring people in your work role or hours of podcasting and using your voice in a way to explain things in a simplified and streamlined way. Yeah, and also I appreciated your use case with the dad jokes and the humor that you and personality that you infused into your application video.

 

Yeah, that was fun. We'll get to that in a second. But I

 

Thanks for watching!

 

guess the analogy that I think of, you know, you were talking about someone being a good developer versus being a good trainer, is I often think of the professional athlete who retires and decides to become a coach. And

 

Yeah.

 

more often than not, they fail and succeed. You know, it's, I can, you know, the sports landscape is littered with former athletes who became coaches and just failed because they were great as a player, but... but not as someone who can teach and train other people.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So yeah, it's definitely, definitely, it's an intrinsic characteristic. You can't, it's hard to teach somebody how to teach.

 

Yep.

 

There's some things you can teach and there's some things you can't, for

 

Mm-hmm.

 

sure, for

 

Yeah,

 

sure.

 

there's

 

And it's interesting, my daughter is in her last year of getting her education degree to

 

Oh

 

be

 

cool.

 

a primary school teacher. And so, you know, as I watch her, and the coursework that she goes through and the things that she learns how to incorporate into her classroom and her teaching, that's part of it. But if she didn't have the personality that she does, which really inspires kids and makes things fun for them, then she wouldn't be a good teacher. She could have all the information, but if she can't convey it in a way that makes people interested, then the good information doesn't really matter at Hill of Beans.

 

Exactly. Yeah. And that's kind of why I mentioned the personality aspect that I appreciated about your application video and said like, you got to have both the heart and the mind, meaning like the personality, the empathy, all of that, but and also the technical skills and also understand kind of the mechanics of how to produce content that is effective and doesn't just waste people's time and and leave them with a fish they can eat but no fishing pole.

 

Right. Yeah, I like to train, but, you know, and I've done it in various places, whether it's been in the tech world, you know, software, whether it's been, you know, back to my early software days where I would travel around to customers and teach them how to use our software that I'd helped develop, or once I became a developer, or even in the fire service, you know, I was training other volunteer firefighters on different things. I'm not the kind of person that could be just a full-time trainer, where I go out and... and I learned something so that I can teach other people. What I prefer to do is it's more like, okay, I've been using this for a while, I'm familiar with it, I know how this is cool, now I wanna show other people how to do the same thing. And so I'll go off and do some training, but not like I just couldn't do the full time, I'm a professional trainer, that's

 

Mm-hmm.

 

not my thing,

 

Yeah.

 

for sure. So the next thing I wanted to delve into is View Mastery videos and how much different they are than almost any other Software training course you teach out that is out there You know whether you look at max me and Schwartz Miller or some of those other trainers on you to me whether you watch Jeffrey way at Laracast whether you watch you know my buddy Eric handshit and all the video he does on program with Eric Almost all of them. It's always Not as structured shall we say You know, it's basically there. They've got they're recording their screen and they have their code editor And then maybe they'll flip over and show you the browser and the effects. And then you'll have your, maybe it's a database tool. If you're looking at your data,

 

Ahem.

 

whether it's Mongo or SQL or, or something like that. As compared to the view mastery stuff where you've got effects and sliding in and highlighting code and, and, and it's very professionally done. It looks very professional. and makes it easy to follow along so you can see what they're doing along with, you know, interspersing the teacher being on camera and so on. And so before we get into some of that nitty-gritty and I can share some of my experiences, was that a decision made from the very beginning that we want to be visibly different than all the other view training courses? Was that just something that sort of developed as you went along or? How did you get to that point where like, okay, we wanna do this in this way that's very different

 

Yeah.

 

from everybody else?

 

Yeah, I mean, that's an excellent question. And it really boils down to the why for why Greg and I started to started this project together. Because he again came from code school and those are very highly produced, highly polished videos. And he had all that experience producing high quality learning content from that. And then for me, I was. Again, seeing the ways in which people were struggling in person, especially learning this all from scratch, and I was producing live presentations that were kind of the live version of the code school type course and so we kind of took our two approaches and combined it and and that's really the view mastery approach and so you mentioned, you know, the the the high level of production that's involved and to really summarize it, it's about making abstract concepts concrete so you can visually see what we're talking about. And that not only helps you grok the new concept as you're learning it, but it gives us kind of iconography and symbols that we can reintroduce throughout the course to remind you and reinforce that same analogy. over the duration of the course, you're getting this really clear kind of visual analogy for the technology that you're working with. We're not just simply staring at code and explaining how it works. We're literally showing you how it works with these detailed in-motion animations. So we highly focus on... the animations, also it's really important to us that we have a nice balance of you seeing the instructor when you need to and not seeing them when you don't need to, meaning often it's better to just see the code and not have like a face blocking some bits. You know, I'm sure we can all empathize with watching a video maybe on YouTube and you're

 

Yes.

 

like, but I can't see this this last part of the line because you didn't move where your face was. So little things like that, of course, we avoid. But also it's really important for us to bring the instructor on. So like, maybe you need to go deeper or say a caveat or you might think this, but it's actually this. So those moments are really great to bring the instructor on and to take a pause, do a pulse check on where we're at in the concept, in the lesson. Additionally, screencasting is a huge, huge component. Instead of just returning, excuse me, hitting record and recording the whole aspect of us building something from start to finish, we really pre-plan and parcel out these like incremental snippets, and this allows us to be very intentional about the order in which we're teaching, and sometimes we'll reorder things prior to the kind of final filming to make it as smooth and incremental as possible. And we're also utilizing the features within the screencasting program that we use to... I describe it as we're isolating focus and we're saying, okay, so we have a limited amount of time with this person and we've got, you know, their entire screen and we need to show them... where to look when and so how we achieve that is we might say like okay so you see this line of code here and then we blur everything but that line of code and you see how this you know maybe it's like passing a parameter over to here and then we draw a line and highlight that other line of code so we're very intentional very specific about isolating that focus exactly where it needs to be so you're not just kind of pointing with your words but you're giving the viewer really no choice, but to look exactly where they need to look. And that lightens the kind of cognitive load of the learner so that they're just absorbing exactly what you need to have them absorb. And then of course you layer on top those animations and those symbols, and it just helps get again, like I started the conversation, get them where you want to be. quicker and more simply. Again, obviously creating the content is not simple at all, but the outcome in terms of receiving that content is a much more simplified and succinct way to learn, we found.

 

Right, so I guess what I'd be, we can talk about through the lens of how the process that I went through is what I'd sort of like to get out there is the amount of detail and planning that went into this. So because you're screencasting and then you have to come back and you have to, you know, do your highlights and moves and stuff like that, I basically scripted out everything

 

Yep. Yep.

 

in Notion. We decided, you and I sat down and decided, okay. So. We want to try to keep it to so many episodes, no more than so many minutes long, because if you get in episodes that are too long, then you lose interest, right? And then somebody, they start to get bored, maybe you're distracted. And so you want to do it long enough to get the information across, but not too long so that you bore them.

 

Yep.

 

And so we use notion and went in and broke it down in episodes and I scripted out, okay, I want to say this and this and this. And I was... I had thought, okay, this is sort of a general thing. I was amazed when you guys came back through and said, okay, so we're gonna insert this video here and this video here, and we're gonna do this highlight here. It was really incredibly

 

Mm-hmm.

 

precise, really incredibly precise into how we did it. Now, for those that are not into screencasting and screen flow, it is not for the faint of heart.

 

Yeah, right.

 

I tried and we wrestled with it and I don't remember if it was just monitor issues on my end and shared monitors or what it was, but we finally said, okay, we're going to have somebody from Vue Mastery do this for you. You just tell us, give us the repo and we're going to let him do it because he's really good at what he does and he can do it a heck of a lot quicker. And I was very grateful for that because

 

Yeah.

 

it took a lot of stress off me. So Andy is very good at editing and... you know, highlighting and doing all the things you need to do very quickly. So, I know you'd mentioned to me maybe before, Edith, if we need to take this out, we can, so it's up to you. But you'd mentioned that maybe you would have him do some of that screen flow instead of the course creator so that the course creator can function on what they're good at and just providing the code, is that how you've been doing things going forward?

 

Yeah, we have. And I think we had that initial conversation right when we first spoke on video about kind of how we were experimenting a bit with the way that we were partnering with you. And it was a bit of a trial and error period. And I think that was really the major sticking point was screen flow. And it's so precise, so specific on how we use it. And it's also... very tedious, I think that's probably the best word for it. And like you said, not for the faint of heart. And so, yeah, so with other people we've partnered with Stenson, we have kept that as an in-house piece of the production process, because it's just something we've refined and it's gonna be a lot quicker and we're gonna get exactly what we had intended to keep that part of the kind of production pie in-house. So thanks for kind of being that testing ground for us.

 

The guinea pig, I was preferring to think of it. You mentioned trial and error.

 

Yeah.

 

I was the error. Ooh, let me tell you. Right. So anyway, so I did that. Now actually I had to create the code obviously and

 

Yep.

 

create the demo app that you're building from start to finish. In my case, we literally went through installing from the command line and getting your app up and running and then you're gonna open this file and do this and change so you see this and then we're gonna. create components and do our search and all that kind of stuff and then have a repository, a GitHub repository that I could share and then Andy went from there. So now the other part of this is the video, the actual recording, the scripting, you know the camera work and all that stuff and that's where Nils comes in. Nils was the video recorder editor guy and he was he was a ton of fun to work with.

 

Yeah.

 

And so what we did, I thought was interesting, was we used, I have an iPhone, we used my iPhone camera.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

And I got a little stand, and we have a little app on there, and I forget what it was called, but some sort of app that we could use to record my video. And then what we would do is we would get on Zoom, so we'd synchronize together, and then I would. Set up my phone and read through the script and record. Okay, you need to record up to here And then we need to quarter up to here and obviously we had to make sure I had to go through and check make sure that my script matched the screen flow because I had the screen and I could see what was going on and So he and I was sitting record and we did it. I think we did it for six videos We did two sessions of a couple hours each Just recording and and and nils is crazy detailed on,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

he's a video guy, he's not a code geek by any stretch of the imagination. He's just a video guy and recording and editing and stuff. And he's got a lot of video production background, if I remember correctly. But the amount of times that he would have me say lines over and over, maybe put more inflection on this or less inflection here, or say it in a brighter tone,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

or that kind of thing was incredibly detailed. And fortunately, I just talked over and over, and then he got to go cut it apart and edit it and do all that background technical stuff. But yeah, that was crazy, the amount of work and expertise that he had to make it sound really good. You know, my voice, I can be, I always joke, you know, I have the base for radio and the voice for being a mime, because mimes are silent.

 

Yeah.

 

And so I really have to work. to pep it up, to say things that don't sound like I'm mad at somebody, you know.

 

hurt yet.

 

Make it sounds like, make it a voice that somebody wants to listen to. And so he was really able to do a very good job about bringing that out of me, and at least I hope so, making

 

Yeah.

 

it somewhat presentable.

 

Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, Nils is awesome. We're actually, before working together in this project, we've been friends for years. But he is, like you said, a video guy. He has a master's in film, actually. So he's done feature length documentaries. He's,

 

Oh wow.

 

you know, he's done a lot of work where he's been interviewing people live. And so he's, he's, he's has directing experience, so that all kind of bundles into a really nice package for hitting all the notes that we're looking for in terms of, like you said, I kind of struggle with that too. I can be a little monotonous unless I'm intentional with adding color and inflection and whatnot. So I'm glad that that was useful for you to have that kind of real time direction and to get that feedback on like, yeah, but say it again and say it a little different. And so... It's important to us that people have that support when they're recording with us so that they aren't just like speaking into the void of a camera and hoping that it sounds good. But so yeah, it's important for us to, especially with people's first initial courses and until they get to that kind of under their belt to give them that direction and to give them that support along the way so that we get a better final product so that you feel highly supported so that you're learning things as you go to be a better kind of on-camera personality to teach more effectively because there's ways to use your face, use your inflection, almost like point with your voice so to speak to make things even clearer than maybe you would naturally say something.

 

Right, right. And so one of the fun things we did too, if you've watched this, you'll notice this at the end was we got, we sort of got to add my personality into some of this, you know. at the end of every podcast episode, I do the dad jokes. And I obviously did the dad jokes, you know, as the demo.

 

Yeah.

 

And so at the end of every episode, there's six chapters or episodes, whatever we call them, we do a section on cringe-worthy dad jokes,

 

Uh-huh.

 

which was funny. And all I knew, I remember, all I knew is that we were adding a dad joke. And then I saw the first one and had this whole title cringe-worthy. And I messaged Adam, he's like, cringe-worthy? Are they really that bad?

 

Well, I

 

I

 

think,

 

said, I said, no, that's good, that's

 

yeah,

 

awesome, that's perfect, and just

 

I

 

left

 

think

 

it at that.

 

that's the metric of a good dad joke if it makes you cringe.

 

Exactly, and I make people cringe all the time, let me tell you. But yeah, so that was fun to be able to do that, and I just picked up six of my more recent ones, and we threw them in there, and then they edited in, and that was that.

 

Yeah, I'm glad that y'all were able to add that additional color and that element of your personality. And really at this point, it's part of your personal brand, your dad

 

Yeah, it

 

jokes.

 

is. It is for sure. Sort of funny, I just had, I get to the point where my daughter's, my son's girlfriend messaged me this morning with another dad joke.

 

Nice.

 

I was like, I like it when people provide them and bring them on for sure. So then, after I did all the recording and stuff, then it was pretty much up to your crew to get it all packaged together and to... posted on View Mastering and YouTube. So it was nice for me. Obviously we talked about me being the heir and figuring out, yeah, he really shouldn't do this screen flow stuff. But as a creator, I can focus on what I need to do without getting stressed out about all the other stuff.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

I was thinking there's this one story, there's, I don't know if you've ever listened to Dave Ramsey.

 

I have, yep.

 

He's a real financial peace university, he's a real financial guru guy. And I went through his course a number of years ago. And he mentions a story about allowing people to focus on what they do. And he told the story about a friend of his who had a car dealership. And the sales weren't really where they could be. And he thought they could be doing better, but couldn't figure out what to do. So Dave went in there and sort of checked the place out and looked around. And he said. The problem is you've got these guys that are salesmen, and they're really good at sales, but they're all bogged down with paperwork and all this other administrative paperwork stuff that they're having to take this time apart to do. He says, why don't you get somebody to do that for them? Administrative assistant, whatever term or role you wanna do that takes that off so they can just focus on selling and get their sale. And he said the guy did that and his sales just went through the roof.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

because they were able to focus on what they did best. So that was one thing I really appreciated about that, you know, having that backing and being able to do that. Now, as I understand, I forget there was one of your people had messaged me in Slack at one point and said, hey, we've got quite the waiting list, you know, people that are looking forward to this class. Now, is it true that when my course was released, it almost crashed your servers? No, I'm kidding, I'm really,

 

Yeah,

 

I'm kidding.

 

almost, but we weathered the storm.

 

You weathered the storm, had to ramp up a few extra servers and cloud stuff, right?

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Had to send in the troops, so we got it done.

 

Yeah, so, and it was good for me. Part of doing that course was, when you and I first hooked up, we were trying to decide, okay, what do we wanna do a course on? And I had some ideas and you were like, no, we got people really asking for Nuxt

 

Mm-hmm.

 

stuff at this point in time. So we decided to go down the Nuxt route. And they say that if you want to learn something, teach it.

 

Oh

 

And

 

yeah,

 

so.

 

yeah.

 

This is so true for me because I have done Nuxt sites and I've done a lot of Nuxt stuff in the past, but it was all version two, version three,

 

Right.

 

and they hadn't had a chance. I was very fortunate in that I had a resource that I could pull from a Daniel Rowe because Daniel has been on this podcast two or three times to talk about Nuxt because he is on the Nuxt Core team.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

He knows very well how stuff works and all the intricate details. I pinged him a couple of times on... Discord and said hey Daniel Can we set aside some time to help me with this and so I

 

Mm-hmm.

 

got his time and he helped me get things up and going So that was a that was a very huge help. I was very fortunate to have that

 

Yeah,

 

to get me up and going for sure

 

yeah, thank gratitude to him for for lending the support because he knows obviously the inside out of of not only how things works But like the why and and what they considered but actually did implement so it's yeah Always the core team members are such excellent resources. We utilize them throughout Throughout our platform, you know at eduardo post va being being one of them So whenever you can get the inside of the brilliant minds that are kind of like constructing the tools that we're using, it's always the best way to go.

 

Yeah, for sure. What was interesting is the time frame in which we were recording this was it was still in beta. I think

 

Mm-hmm.

 

it

 

Yep.

 

wasn't in beta. It wasn't even 1.0 hadn't been released. And so things could be changing. And I

 

Yep.

 

think in fact, I remember at one point, one of the things that changed from the time I started till we ended, and Andy had to point this out to me, was for instance, the suggested structure of the component in terms of putting the script at the top instead of the template at the top.

 

Mm-hmm. Yep.

 

And that was one of the things he had changed. And I saw that, I said, did I miss something here? He said, yeah, you did. That's sort of

 

Hehehehe,

 

the suggested,

 

right.

 

pointed me to the view docs. I was like, oh, okay, good to know. I'm glad we did that. So yeah, that makes it more fun to be doing a course while the ground underneath you is changing.

 

Yeah, that's always a fun one. That's a moving target of like, obviously it's our intention to release content as soon as it's relevant. You know, like if we waited until the official release of something to start producing the content

 

Right.

 

on it, then it'd be too late. So fortunately and unfortunately, the way that we work is to try to get ahead of it. But what that means is it's a moving target and things could be. slightly different in the beta version than the live version, so maybe you have to amend things just before you record it, or maybe we have to go back a few weeks after the official release and then release our updated version of the course, but it's our intention to be of most benefit to our users in the timely fashion, and so that's how we work. But I'm glad that you had that kind of that experience of learning as you were teaching. And I find, yeah, that's the best way that I found to learn anything. Is if I know I've got to explain it in a way where, you know, potentially millions of people are going to like have that aha moment, then I've got to really clearly understand this in a way that I can say it as clearly as possible.

 

Yes, for sure. That's always a nice little incentive. Am I going to look like an idiot or am I going

 

Right,

 

to look good?

 

yeah, people gonna question my competence or no?

 

Right, right, for sure. All right, so before we move on to picks, anything else you wanted to cover that we haven't delved into yet?

 

I think we can move into picks.

 

All right, so I will go first and let the guests go last. My usual week ending of these podcasts is with the dad jokes, so today will be no different. Gotta dig through my list here. So, New Year's coming up. A lot of people do New Year's resolutions. And so what I've decided this year... is I'm going to open a gym. You know, a lot of people want to exercise, right? And get into shape. I exercise quite a bit, you know, just to keep in shape, otherwise I'd look like a giant marshmallow. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open a gym called Resolutions. So it'll have exercise equipment for the first two weeks and then it turns into a wine bar for the rest of the year.

 

Hehehe

 

Right? Because that's the way resolutions usually go. So, you know, talk, you hear the jokes about, you know, somebody walks into a bar and such and such happens. So, a skunk, a deer, and a duck went out to dinner. But when it came time to pay, the skunk didn't have a cent, the deer didn't have a buck, and so they put it on the duck's bill.

 

Cringing over here Steve

 

Yes, yes, you're laughing too, I can hear it. You know, it's funny, back when I was in high school, back in the 80s, there was these shirts that were duck shirts and they had all these duck puns about mallard adjusted and so on, I loved them. And I had one that said, just another bill, you know, it shows a duck paying a bill or something like that.

 

Yeah.

 

I wish I still had it, it was so good. And then, you know, we always talk about developers having side gigs. And so I started one. a school, speaking of schools, you know, viewmastery, where I was gonna teach people the art of clairvoyance, but unfortunately it was shut down due to unforeseen circumstances. Right? It's like the time I went to see a clairvoyant fortune teller and I knocked on the door and she said, "'Who is it?' And so I left.

 

Hehehe

 

And if she doesn't know who I am, how she's gonna be able to help me? Right, so anyway, those are the dad jokes of the week. What do you got for us, Adam, in terms of pics?

 

What do I got? So my picks, so non-tech related, I am definitely on the White Lotus bandwagon. I'm not sure if you've seen that or heard

 

You know,

 

of that.

 

somebody was starting, in our company Slack, somebody started a channel specifically devoted to the White Lotus. And I was like, what the,

 

Oh, okay.

 

I don't even know what it is yet.

 

Yeah, it's so it just concluded its second season. I haven't finished the final episodes, but it's basically a mystery. It's kind of almost like, like clue, you know, like who done it type thing. And you know that, and this is not a spoiler, but like in the beginning of each season, you realize that someone has died, but they don't you don't know who you don't know how. And then throughout the course of the season, they kind of like build up is really excellently written where it could be anyone, could be anyone who is a killer or is the victim, and you don't know until the very last moment. So it's just really good writing and it's got humor in it. Jennifer Coolidge is excellent in it. And so that would be my top non-tech pick. But I also have a tech pick called View Fire. Have you heard of this?

 

View fire, I have not.

 

This is one of the newer projects that Eduardo San Martin Morote is working on. So he built, for those of you who are not aware, he built Vue Router as well as Pinnia. So he also has been working on, and it'll officially be released soon, maybe by the time some of you hear this. So Vue Fire is essentially a collection of composables that helps us use Firebase. in our Vue apps. So we're really excited about having a kind of post-sva approved and designed way to use Firebase, and I'm sure it's going to be an excellent tool just like Pinia and just like Vue Router is. He has a very brilliant mind and one of my favorites in the Vue ecosystem, so I'm happy that he has this new tool under his belt for us all to use. We're actually working on a course on Firebase and using Vue Use, so it's going to be a Firebase Foundations course that we're releasing in the coming weeks and So yeah, you'll learn all about this tool and also wanted to plug that'll be a prerequisite for we're working on More NUX content. So we've got Steve's NUX 3 essentials. We've got Ben Hong who is a NUX ambassador He built a course on how to create a blog with NUX 3's content module which is a nice nice way to build a content-driven app and he's working on a full stack Nux 3 course where we're gonna really focus on intersectionality where we're combining Nux 3 with Firebase using the Vue Fire and also styling it with Vue Defy and throwing in some composable so really baking the cake with a lot of those intersecting technologies that a lot of the Vue Pros want to use together.

 

So ViewFire is sort of like mongooses for Mongo with Node type of thing, where it's just sort of like an SDK, where it gives you ways to plug in, and it does all the dirty work communicating with Firebase.

 

Yeah, via like elegant composables is my understanding.

 

Okay, definitely view three then for sure

 

Yep, yep, for sure.

 

Excellent. All right. Well, I've got those noted down and we will throw those into the show notes

 

Awesome.

 

So if people want to get hold of you or give you more money just for free, you know Or anything like that obviously, we know view mastery any to follow you on Twitter or where else can people get ahold of you?

 

Yeah, you can follow me at Adam Jar, that's J-A-H-R on Twitter, as well as, you know, check us out on YouTube with our View Mastery channel. You can subscribe and watch all of the free content that we publish there. And also, of course, our heart of everything is at ViewMastery.com, where all of the free stuff lives in addition to all of the conference videos, as well as all of the current and existing courses on all the topics you need to be the best view developer you can possibly be.

 

Awesome. All right, well thank you for coming, Adam. This has been a lot of fun. Been looking forward to this one for a while. Like you said, if you wanna check out some amazing Vue videos, go to VueMastery.com. And if you want a dad joke five days a week, you can follow me at wonder95 on Twitter. And with that, we will wrap it up. Thank you for coming, Adam, and we will talk at you all next time.

 

All right, thank you, Steve. Thanks for listening.