Pivoting, Sustainability and Continuity

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the things I’ve started this year. It’s been a rough one, a hard-working year full of… well, let’s be honest, COVID has kinda fucked things up.

I was going pretty heavy into YouTube at the beginning of the year, trying to grow a brand and create content that I truly thought (and still think now) is cool, interesting and fun. My malware dev series was a blast, and something I genuinely learned a lot from. The trading bot was something cool that allowed me to learn a lot about the world of algorithmic trading, an interest I’m still fascinated by today. There were a couple problems with my approach back then, though, that lead to the lull that you’ve seen in my channel now.

TL;DR: I wasn’t creating content in a sustainable way, and the quality of the content was bad. I was trying to be a full-time content creator without the actual time commitment and subsequent quality that comes from that. It was taking ages to write up scripts, film and edit episodes and series. I’m a dad working a full-time job, trying to launch a SaaS app and trying my best to keep some level of balance in my social life during a pandemic… Doing all that + devoting a ton of time and effort to content creation just wasn’t sustainable.

Another issue I have with my content earlier this year was its lack of impact. I built cool stuff and logged some of the process, but not enough of it to be actually helpful to people. I was spending a ton of time and effort to create a badly produced vlog talking about, but not really explaining, technical subjects. I could pump out 3 vlogs a day containing a bunch of nerdy Logan Paul-esque content, but what impact would I have? I was actually in a worse place than that hypothetical: I was spending a ton of time and effort producing content that… frankly didn’t matter.

So, I regrouped. I looked at the series and videos that were well-received, looked at what landed well, looked at the content that people engaged with. I found a couple things:

• The OSCP series did incredibly well. People still ask if I’ve completed the OSCP (no, I haven’t, but I might do that later this year) and people were engaged and curious about the really low-quality vlog style content there, which is surprising to me honestly.
• The Scamming the Scammer video was a “breakout” success. People really liked the “chaotic good” aspect of that video, and honestly I enjoyed making it.
• The one-off, random info-vlogs like my one about Alibaba and China, didn’t do so well. That kinda sucks since I put a fair bit of effort into these.

While I was introspecting, a lot of things happened.

The Pivot

I started developing SketchyReq in January of this year, and it’s become my baby since. Also in that time, I switched jobs, becoming a Sr. Engineer for the first time in my very short career. I essentially switched over to a much more R&D centric job, one that I love and one that I didn’t realize I wanted until late this year. This meant way more coding, way more “in-the-weeds” technical work, and way more to learn

I’ve loved it.

Because of that, I decided I was going to give YouTube and content creation another go, this time from a development angle. I’ll still have the information security focus, but now I’ll be far more focused on development in the general sense. I’ve learned a lot from other content creators in the development space, people who have helped me learn new technologies and languages, people like Florin Pop, Randall and Dani, Devon Crawford, Ben Awad, Will Kwan, Tech with Tim, The Cyber Mentor and Denis Ivy, to name a few. One of the many things I’ve learned from them: sustainability is key. They have sustainable content creation strategies that focus on quantity and quality, sustainable series that are easier to produce than a lot of the more long-form stuff I was making. They also have had huge impacts in so many people’s lives because they focused on education and several different levels, and focused on it hard. Their videos are simple, in terms of production: sitting in front of the camera, speaking, screen and audio recordings. No B-Roll, no complicated effects, etc. The aforementioned content creators are all also full-time workers, so they have to focus on sustainability.

Thus, Viking Dev was born!

Starting this week, I’ve begun building out a backlog of videos around development and technical topics. I’ve pruned my videos a bit to remove some of the obvious bad attempts and plan to continue on with content creation with a much more sustainable plan: content creation with an educational and sustainable focus.

Blogs will follow the videos, because I found many people preferred a more static, reading approach versus videos. I also kinda want to grow my blog following since I genuinely enjoy writing, so this will be a much more free-form content creation space than the YouTube channel.

I’ve rambled for long enough. Thank you for reading, thank you for being patient and thank you for continuing to support. You can find me on YouTube here, where you can subscribe to know when I start uploading again, or you can set up an RSS feed to this blog to know when I go live with a new post or video. Thank you for your support!