One of my favorite series of blog posts was Swift Diary, written by Brent Simmons while he was learning Swift. He laid it all out there, risked sounding ignorant, but learned a lot. So did all his readers. In many ways, he was an inspiration for this post.

So, too, were my dear friends Myke and Stephen. They’ve been branching out from audio into video for a long time. At first I shrugged it off as just doing what all the Cool Kids™ are doing. Then I saw their videos get better and better, and I couldn’t help but feel intrigued.

Maybe that was feeling left out and left behind—they were moving forward while I was standing still. I wanted to try to do a video or two of my own, but I knew I didn’t want to do a vlog and I didn’t have a museum of old Apple hardware laying around to film. What then?

Last night’s post was the perfect excuse. I wanted to try to make a screencast. I would basically take the time to show, rather than tell, what I was talking about in that post. Twenty minutes later, I had my first screencast. A couple hours later, it was on YouTube.

This video has many problems that I need to fix for next time:

• I’m backlit
• The font in Xcode, Visual Studio Code, and Terminal is way too small
• I’m way too monotone
• I made too many mistakes, because I was talking extemporaneously rather than from some sort of script
• Only after I uploaded the video I realized the audio was only in the left channel. The linked video is actually the second copy, now with fixed audio.
  • Goodbye, ~50 views and ~3 thumbs up. 😭

I share the above partially to avoid getting that feedback, but also to acknowledge—like Brent did—that I am fumbling along, learning as I go. Hopefully the next video will be better, and the next even better still. For as long as I keep up with it.

I intend to convert my series on RxSwift into one or more videos sometime over the next few weeks. I think that they’re the perfect content for a screencast. After that, who knows. All I know is, this one was fun to make.

I’ve embedded the video below, but it’s best watched fullscreen on as large a screen as you have handy. Please do share any feedback you may have; the only way for me to get better is to learn from my mistakes.