Hey, I'm Gopar
and today I'm going to talk about
being an Emacs influencer
and try to convince you to be one too.
Hopefully that goes well.
If not, we'll see at the end of the talk.
But first, I want to share something,
and that is: that knowledge grows when it is shared.
This is usually how I end my videos.
Some of you may be familiar with this.
I say this quote because I believe there is truth to it.
The more you share something, the more you reinforce it,
and the more the knowledge grows, not just for you,
but for everybody else around it with who you share it with.
With that being said,
there's only one question I want to ask you.
That is: what is the last time you shared something?
Now, the sharing of knowledge
doesn't just have to be about Emacs.
It can just be about other things that you learn in life.
There's plenty of things
that I share with people that I've learned in life,
and I hope that they learn from what I'm saying as well.
Learn from the mistakes in others
type of deal, things like that.
But anyway, since this is EmacsConf,
we're gonna keep it to Emacs-related,
so we're going to find ways
on how to share all that Emacs knowledge
that is locked up inside you guys' brain.
So sharing Emacs, how can we do that?
Well, there's a few ways.
We can do meetups and conferences, aka EmacsConf,
like we're doing now. So hopefully one of you guys
might be incentivized to share the knowledge
that you have in the next upcoming year,
or the future ones, or be a repeated presenter.
The list goes on and on.
Blog posts. So, one of the easier entries to [??]
because it is writing
and you don't have to do video,
not like the other formats that I'm about to present.
Tweeting is also an easier format as well
because it's even smaller than a blog post, more condensed,
and you can use hashtags. When I was learning,
when I was reading the Org Mode manual,
I would use the hashtag #OrgTip on on Twitter.
Even if you search right now,
I believe you'll find some of my tweets.
But yeah, that's one way
that you can go about it: simple tweets
that you find, little things, little nuggets of gold
as I would say. Of course, there's podcasts,
which I'm pretty sure
the Emacs community would love to have,
so if anybody wants to pick up a podcast
go right ahead. Twitch live streaming,
which is... Twitch is a platform
in which you can do live streaming
for those who are not familiar.
And people, I've seen people use the Emacs tag in there
and, you know, just pop up, say hello,
ask questions, things like that.
You can be working on the configuration
or just reading Emacs source code,
you know, fun stuff like that.
Videos, which is what I do,
which I will touch on in a second.
There's probably more formats
that I'm not thinking at the moment
and that you guys can probably fill in the gaps.
But yeah, these are just some of the ways
that we can share Emacs. So how do we get started?
Well, before we get started,
I want to talk about my credentials, right?
I mean, who is this guy
that you're just listening in this little square
talking about creating videos?
Well, I run a channel called goparism on YouTube.
It has around 2700 subscribers at the moment.
I kind of know a little bit of the flow.
I'm not an expert, but I've done enough videos
that I kind of understand the flow of all of
at least the simple way of doing it, which I want to share.
So right now you're probably thinking,
OK, I get that you want to sell us
on the whole video making formats
or you know sharing just Emacs in general,
but I'm a beginner, I'm an intermediate, I'm advanced,
I don't know if I can provide input.
Each of those, I want to tackle each of those,
and say that yeah, each of you have input.
You know, for a beginner it might be say,
oh, an intermediate and an advanced person
already has information.
Intermediate might say, oh, I'm not at that level yet.
An advanced person might say, oh, I have nothing to say.
You know, I don't... What I know,
everybody else knows.
So I want to, you know, dispel all that and just tell you that,
hey, it doesn't matter.
So for beginners, you guys are in a beautiful place,
which is that you have a clean slate.
So the way I imagine is that every Emacs user
is presented[??] upon themselves,
you know, kind of like this world.
And in this world, you can either build a road
that goes to the mountains, the city, or to the beach.
Some of us have decided which way we want to go.
Some of us might be building
the road to the city, to the beach, for example.
If someone starts a road to the city,
they are probably stuck in their ways, right?
And then what leads them to the goal to the city,
they're not going to make a detour towards the mountain
or towards the beach to get to the city.
They just want the straightest path.
And when you are used to doing things a certain way,
you're going to have a ton of vision.
So as a beginner, you don't have any of that
because you're just starting brand new.
Everything is, you know, a world of possibilities.
So I would say that this is a very big advantage.
The second one is that people enjoy the journey, right?
People want to see someone grow from this spot
to the next level, etc, etc.
This is one of the reasons why we watch movies,
TV shows, anime, right?
Because there's a character that needs a problem
and they're working their way up to solve that problem.
If we just get to see the ending
of where they solve the problem,
we don't really feel anything
because we weren't part of that journey.
I would say that starting from scratch
is a pretty good place to be.
Of course, if you're going
to be writing or making videos
or anything related to Emacs, you kind of have to force...
If you want to teach people, you kind of have to learn it.
You're kind of forced to learn,
which is always encouraged.
For intermediates now, you might be saying,
hey, I'm a little past intermediate.
I'm sorry, past beginner,
but I don't feel confident enough to share.
Well, let's say that you're wrong. Once you're intermediate,
you're probably fiddling with your Emacs config,
maybe doing something with Org Mode,
like a lot of people are doing it,
and you can document, talk about the things that you do,
and also those functions that you write in Elisp
to just improve quality of life, things like that.
There's a whole list of things that you can do.
These are just two things out of a plethora.
of items that you can talk about.
For my advanced folks, you guys are in a position
where you guys know more about the Emacs internals.
You might have read the source code.
You might know a Emacs manual section pretty well
that you can talk about.
Usually when you're at the advanced
or intermediate level,
you start, or at least some people start writing packages.
You can talk about the best practices
for creating packages, the troubles that you face, you know,
the things that you learn, things like that.
Now that I've given a little bit of examples
for each of these tiers, there's probably still
something going on in each of you guys' mind,
which is something all of us get to face,
and that is impostor syndrome. Now, with impostor syndrome,
the sad reality is that we all have it at some point,
we're going to, you know,
at the beginner, intermediate, or even advanced stage,
it doesn't matter,
there's always that little voice of imposter syndrome saying,
hey, "You're probably not good enough" or not...
but questioning if you're good enough
or if you deserve to be at this level and things like that.
I believe it's very common with software engineers.
The other sad thing is that it will never go away
But the way I see it with impostor syndrome
is that we embrace it.
If we are getting an impostor syndrome,
it's because we're pushing ourself to a next level
that we haven't been able to to overcome or to progress in.
If you're pushing yourself, you will get impostor syndrome.
Like, hey, am I good enough to lead this project?
To finish this? To optimize this part
or whatever? I feel it's a good way.
Impostor syndrome, yeah, it feels horrible,
but I believe that if you have it,
it's because you're doing something right.
Okay, now that we've gotten
that out of the way, what's the process for recording?
Well, it's actually a lot simpler than you think.
There's three steps, and one of them
you might not even have to do,
depending on how you want to go about it.
The first one is that you have
to record your voice and screen,
because if you do want to make video,
people have to see what you're doing
and they have to hear what you're talking,
otherwise it's going to be not as engaging.
Of course, you can make the face optional
when recording videos.
If you watch some of my videos, sometimes
I show my face, sometimes I don't.
It just really depends on the mood of what I'm doing
when I'm recording the video. But yeah, completely up to you.
After recording, you can edit if desired.
I remember when I first started making the videos,
I was not editing them at all.
I was just one shot and upload.
That can either be good or bad
depending on how you view it,
but it is what it is. Nowadays I do some light editing,
mainly just to remove the silences
or when I'm going through debugging something.
Third one is to upload it,
which might be the easiest section,
depending on your goals.
At minimum, you would put title, description,
and a little bit more.
You'll get why I see it can be as easy
or as complicated as you want,
which I'll go over later at the end.
Let's go over details for recording.
For recording, thankfully, all OSes,
or at least the major OSes, have free recording software,
or you can go a little fancy and get paid [software],
which usually, you know, depending on your viewpoint,
might make things easier or not.
Personally, I use, I'm on Mac,
so I use the built-in screen recording,
which, if you do Command-Shift-5,
it will pop up a little dialog, and if you did it just now,
you can press the Escape key
to get rid of it, and life goes on.
Also for all major 3 OSes, OBS
is a pretty popular choice not just for streaming,
but for recording as well.
That's something you might want to look at.
If you do decide to record videos.
All up to you. These are just things
that I've come along or encountered along the way.
When it comes to recording,
I do have some tips that might help you out.
At least, if I could go back in time,
this is what I would tell myself: that
audio quality matter matters.
If possible, get an external mic.
That is not always feasible,
because extra mic costs money,
and when you're starting out with YouTube,
you are not going to make a penny.
YouTube has very high restrictions
or bars that you need to pass
before you start getting any revenue. For example,
my channel, I still haven't met those bars,
so i'm still not generating any revenue.
Anything that I buy is just out of pocket.
Since I work from home, I already had a mic
and things like that set up.
I just use that for recording videos.
But if you have... You can use
the built-in mic in your laptop if you have one.
I would strongly suggest if you do that,
try to minimize the noise. Go into a quiet room
and make sure there's no washing machine
or anything going off right now,
because people do not... They can handle,
you know, not the greatest quality of video.
But when it comes to audio, picky
people are a lot more pickier when it comes to that.
Next is don't start with recording the face.
Voice and screen are just fine.
Personally, I feel when I started recording my face,
it made it harder in a sense,
because now I was just not only concentrating
on what I was showing, how it was sounding,
but how I look, if I was making any faces like that.
It's just one less thing to have on your brain
when you're recording.
Another thing is that when I started recording,
I was very passionate or excited about doing this.
What I would do is--I took that to the advantage--
is that I just recorded a lot of videos
in one go or in sessions.
As soon as I recorded, start the next one,
next one, et cetera. I strongly believe that helped
because later down the road,
once I got busy with work or life or whatever,
I didn't really have to worry about making time.
I already had a batch ready to go
that I can just slowly pull out and edit and upload.
That's something helpful whenever you know work is slow
or your vacations or things like that, you want to record,
just go for it.
Another one is when you are editing, you can use pauses
so that it's easier to edit
because what happens to... At least this
is what happened to me
when I was beginning,
I would say, oh I can mumble fumble,
you know, do a lot of verbal fillers,
and I can just edit it,
but if you don't do any pauses
it's hard to fix the mistakes,
the things that you don't want people seeing
because then it doesn't blend well
if you do editing. If you do any editing,
you know what I'm talking about,
because then there's chops of audio
from the previous clip.
Trying to edit... There's ways to mitigate that,
but my editing skills are very minimal.
It's just what I need to know to get things done.
Just using pauses helps out a lot.
Another thing is that
some people want to record in like super-high quality,
you know, get the highest quality possible for the video.
I would say instead of focusing on the video recording,
focus on the audio, like I mentioned,
because at the end of the day,
we're in Emacs and we're only sharing text.
You know, there's only so much definition
that you can show on text.
If anything, just increase the font. Simple as that.
My personal favorite,
or at least the one that I still encounter even now,
is that when I'm recording, my voice still feels dry.
Right when I'm about to record,
all of a sudden, I get dry. I need to drink water.
It feels uncomfortable. I get nervous
because it's something new. I'm staring at myself.
It's like, oh man, all the... I mentioned just extra things
that I need to worry about.
But all of this goes less with practice.
The more you do it, the more comfortable you are.
It's just like everything else.
When you start learning guitar,
your fingers are very hard. When you start learning piano,
the independence of fingers don't want to work.
When you're learning drums,
each limb needs to be independent.
It's very hard. You have to start very slow.
Everything in life, you know, practice
and it will get better. All right now .
Editing, well, like I mentioned,
this is not always going to be necessary,
depending on your style.
There's some Youtube Emacs creators
that simply record everything in one go.
They might get up, get a coffee or something,
and they'll just leave that in the clip,
which is totally fine.
No shame. It's the way they they want to do the video.
Sometimes they just don't have any time
to edit the videos themselves
or pay someone else to do it.
What's the best next thing? just leave it as is,
upload, and that's fine. That completely works.
I will say that if you do end up editing
or deciding to edit, and you want software
I would say check out DaVinci Resolve.
It's free. It's available on the three major OSes.
Honestly, DaVinci Resolve by itself
has a plethora of features.
I personally, I only use like 5% max of the features.
It's professional,
it's like professional studio all the way, things like that.
But yeah, I would say DaVinci Resolve
is a pretty solid choice.
Okay, what about the tips for editing?
Well, most of them are pretty straightforward.
Just learn enough to get going, like in all things.
Like if you have a band practice
and you're rehearsing a song,
you just need to know the chords,
you don't need to know improvise,
just enough to get you through this gig
that you're playing. That's pretty much it.
Of course, learn the keyboard shortcuts.
We all come from Emacs, so we all know how valuable,
how much we treasure shortcuts to avoid the mouse.
unfortunately since you're editing,
you will still have to use the mouse,
but the more keyboard shortcuts you use,
the less the mouse is used. So there's that.
One thing is that--I didn't know you can actually do this
until I started editing--
is that you can play the speed of the video in 2x.
For me this is great because
since I'm mainly just listening for pauses in my video,
I just wait until there's silence.
Oh, that's the part I need to trim,
or that's the part I need to remove. Simple as that.
Also batch edit, the same thing
as I said about recording videos, just do it in batch.
You can also just batch edit as well.
Uploading, the final step. YouTube,
if you do end up using YouTube
which is the most popular choice for uploading videos,
is that the uploading process
is pretty straightforward.
I imagine this is the same for every other platform
that you choose. It's pretty straightforward,
but it can be a little complicated
depending on what you want to do.
What are my tips for uploading?
Well, first of all, at minimum,
you need to have a descriptive title
and a description of what you talk about in the video,
just to help out with SEO and things like that
when people are searching for Emacs on YouTube.
Also, if possible, use a thumbnail.
There's a whole community about Emacs creators
discussing best practices to get the highest engagement,
how to get people watching your videos, things like that,
and one of the things
is they highly recommend a thumbnail.
If you mainly watch, or if you watch any Emacs content,
a lot of us do not use thumbnails,
and that's perfectly fine.
I think the Emacs community is pretty used
to just watching videos with just a thumbnail,
it's just a screenshot of the video,
and we just go there for the content, right?
We're not really going there for anything else,
for the knowledge that the person is spreading.
I say that it can be as simple or as complex,
because if your goal is to potentially
earn revenue down the line,
you will want to spend some time configuring
some of the settings for uploading, like the tags,
I forget what they're called, but they're
a little embedded so that people can watch
other videos and things like that.
So there's a plethora of options, an abundance of options.
Honestly, there's too many,
but it all depends if you potentially want
to make some type of income in the future
with Emacs, making videos on Emacs.
And yeah, that's just something
that you will have to discover
and read and learn more about what the Emacs community,
Emacs creator community suggest,
and best practices and things like that.
But if anybody ever wants to talk about it,
feel free to reach out to me.
I would love to talk about things
about YouTube and all this,
because I find it interesting. Potentially, hopefully,
one day, I'll be able to make some revenue.
Hopefully, maybe some of you guys
might knock it out of the park
with what I'm going to talk about next.
That is your secret sauce. This is your ultimate weapon
as to get viewers, to get subscribers, you know,
to get anybody that wants
to watch your... to reach a higher audience.
That can be your humor. You might be naturally funny.
You can make comments.
You have a natural skill on the way you talk,
on the way you articulate things,
so you might be able to get people drawn to that,
or you might be someone who just does animations
for your videos, which does highly well as well.
or you can do a mix of all these.
You can just insert your superpower
whatever you want. You can go ahead
and use that to your advantage
to grow user base, a viewer base.
Hopefully, if all things align,
you'll be able to get paid
to also create Emacs videos soon, spread the knowledge,
which would be pretty cool--become an Emacs influencer,
which is the goal, right? Okay.
I believe I painted this in a pretty good light,
at least personal opinion.
But like everything, every good also has a bad.
Nothing is always perfect.
That's also the same for Youtube.
What are the bads of Youtube?
Well, it's not going to be an overnight success.
That is very very rare. You're not going to create a video
and then all of a sudden get like a hundred thousand views.
I believe by from what I've seen in the community
if a video gets over 10k
that it means that it did really well in the Emacs community.
I think on average is under 3k for a video within...
This is within the time span of
I'd say like two weeks or so or a month, around there.
So it varies. All these metrics you'll learn
if you really actually want to be able
to create something in the Emacs...
But like I said, it does take work and it does take time.
Another thing is that negative feedback people are very quick
as we all have been accustomed to that.
People are do not shy from being very negative.
It is so easy to just say negative and mean things online
because there's no repercussions.
I don't understand why people do that, but it is what it is.
But most of these comments are from the younger population.
You know, just ignore them.
Most of the time, they're just ignorant.
They don't know what they're saying.
It will help you get them, you know, grow some thick skin.
If you already have thick skin, then you don't.
This is not going to be a problem.
But most of the negative comments that I've receive our
or childish, I would say,
that it's not really based on anything that has substance.
Yeah, just ignore it. It's fine.
It's not going to affect your day.
"Don't let it affect your day"
is the most important thing.
Third, like I was mentioning, revenue is very hard
to get monetized on by YouTube standards.
That will definitely take some time and dedication.
But if you really want it, you will work for it.
Hopefully all of us,
the people that are constantly creating content
via these platforms are able to get compensated
in some way or another,
because we do share it because we love it,
but also it would be nice to get some compensation.
I'm not speaking for everybody. I'm speaking personally
because time is a valuable asset.
You can choose what you want to spend it
and right now I'm having fun making videos.
That's what I'm deciding to spend it.
But yeah now, with all this that I've said,
there's only one question that I want to ask all of you,
and that is: what are you going to share?