Ben Scheirman, creator of NSScreencast.com and CombineSwift.com

Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, and welcome to another special edition of my podcast. I'm sitting here with an interesting and named Ben Sherman. He's an experienced software developer from Euston, Texas, he spent most of his time writing swift and Ruby and recorded screencast. That's probably also the thing that most people know about any screencasts that come. And he's a regular speaker at conferences all over the world. And if you want to have him at one of your conferences, so he's always happy for you to get in touch with him. He started programming when he was 13. And I think we'll go a little bit more into all these things that he has done over his career thus far. So Hi, Ben. And welcome. Ben Scheirman: Hi. Hi. It's great to be here. Thanks. Jeroen Leenarts: So I'm just to get things started. Most people know you by an A screencast.com. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. So and the screencast of calm is probably the thing that you spend most of your time on. Are there any other things that you do besides and a screencast? that you consider to be impactful in your life? Or? Ben Scheirman: Yeah, I mean, for work or personal? I both Jeroen Leenarts: really just the what, what are your passions? Yeah. So, Ben Scheirman: you know, On the work side, I spend a fair amount of my time teaching developers in some form or another, I've always liked that sort of role, if it's just pair programming with somebody or teaching, you know, onboarding a new developer to a company or, or for actually to, you know, teaching in official capacity, like in a class, or, you know, and for the past few years, it's been largely Video, Video Training. So I started in a screencast, because I wanted it to exist, I was learning Ruby on Rails way back in the day, and I got a lot of value out of a site called rails cast comm. And this guy, Ryan Bates was just really nice to listen to. And he made these short screencasts. And I learned little tiny bits of Rails over time. And over time, you know, over time, I felt like quite an expert in this framework that I had really never sat down and said, Oh, I'm going to learn it from start to finish. You know, it's just like a small investment, like every day or two. And so as I was learning iOS development, and this was, you know, I had to learn Objective C, which, you know, at first seemed like this awful language that I was just going to have to deal with. And, you know, so I was a little bit intimidated. And, you know, the learning curve was definitely there. Because I came from the dotnet world at the time, where, you know, things were totally different. And, you know, Objective C was lower level, you had to deal with pointers again. And, and so I just felt like maybe an NS, or maybe like, kind of a screencast type. product would be really useful for the community. And, and enough people, you know, I mentioned this to enough people that they were just like, hey, you should just make this. And so yeah, I did that in, I think it was March of 2012. So it's, you know, over eight years now, I've been recording screencasts, I am on number 467. Now, and if you know, and I've just covered like the range of iOS development from, you know, Core Data, to networking, to testing to, you know, some game development and making a podcast app, and just all all aspects, I seemingly never run out of topics, because there's just so much to cover. And, of course, everything's changing a lot, as well. And that's one of the things that I think that is helpful as developers to have some way of just kind of continually learning. And if, if you're not, if you're not continually learning, then it's easy to kind of stagnate. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, but let's, like, go back, like, all the way to the beginning, because you've I think you've been doing software development in some capacity for quite a few years already. Ben Scheirman: Yeah, so I got my start in web development, I, I, I was really into computers as a kid, like many of us, and I really, you know, I had a car and I wanted to put a computer in my car. And this was, you know, the late 90s. And so mp3, these were a thing, but, you know, I had maybe 20 of them or something, you know what I mean? You didn't have like, gigabytes of music on your computer, or you know, iPods didn't exist and and so I really wanted mp3 is in my car. And I found a community of people who were posting their own projects of this sort of thing on a site called mp3 car.com. And so I I learned how to write HTML and and take pictures and put them on the web and stuff like that, so I could share my own project. And like, like many side projects, this was something that I never actually put in my car but it was a it was a fun like hobby to use old computer parts and to hack together a case that would work and and And, you know, hacked together some hardware that could, you know, read the the currently playing song over the parallel port from Winamp. And all this kind of, you know, fun stuff. And I took lots of pictures of it and put it up on the web. So that process of kind of like, wanting to build a website was what led me to my first job. So this is before I graduated from college. And so I did cold fusion and ASP, kind of ecommerce website development for a small company, here in Houston, Texas. And yeah, so that kind of was my first, my first start into, you know, programming professionally. Jeroen Leenarts: So, um, but you started with, with ASP, you mentioned, so Microsoft technology that was before the dotnet. Boom, I think, yeah, so Ben Scheirman: I got to choose between VB script and J script back in back in those days, and I was actually more of a fan of ColdFusion. You know, my boss had taught me both both of these things, he just knew that I knew HTML. And so I was basically a blank slate. And ColdFusion was just way easier. I felt like everything I had to do in ASP was just kind of more manual. And, and, but, you know, it was nice to be able to learn both, because eventually I did go into ASP dotnet, which is, you know, where I spent, you know, quite a few years, you know, doing the Microsoft thing. Jeroen Leenarts: You did not have a formal education in computer science or something related, you went into another direction, Ben Scheirman: at that time. Yeah, so that was, you know, I was in college for computer science, but I had yet to take any computer science courses. So as all doing history, and political science, and, you know, all of those things before I could actually get to my actual, you know, programming courses. And so it was a nice way to, to do that. And when I did finally get a job doing dotnet development, I was able to kind of relate the problems I was experiencing at the day job with, you know, a professor that I had in my university, who is just fantastic. He was a great mentor. And so I would come to him with like, lots of problems about, okay, well, we have this problem where we're all trying to edit the same files all the time. And, and he would be like, Okay, well, you know, so he was the one who taught me how to use source control, or at least, like, planted the seed, you know, so he'd share a book with me, and I would go, go off and read this book, and just absorb it all. It was just like, this time of my life where I had nothing but problems. And everyone out there seeming, Lee had already written about solutions. And so it's just kind of a nice, a nice place to, to learn. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so then you've worked with Microsoft related technologies for a couple of years did a lot of things with dotnet, I imagined. So what was your path there? Because at some point, iOS, well, no, I should actually say iPhone always became a thing. But there's some time in between those two. Ben Scheirman: Yeah, so I was doing, you know, web development with ASP dotnet. And for a consulting company here in Houston, and it just, you know, as I progressed, in my career, I would do less and less actual interesting development work. And you seem to like, like the upgrade, or the kind of career paths for people like me, were to go into management to manage a team, and I didn't really want to do that. And on top of that, you know, the kind of large company consulting tends to move a lot slower, be less open to new ideas. And I was all wanting to learn about the cutting edge of like test driven development and, and, you know, using like, Object Relational mappers, to access the database, instead of using stored procedures, and, and it seemingly seemed like even agile development was kind of like a no no word at this company, or at most of my clients. And so I just kind of, I was getting more and more disheartened with that sort of community. And I was writing a book on ASP. NET MVC. And as part of the book, I wanted to compare this web framework to Ruby on Rails. And so I was fond of Ruby on Rails, I'd seen it and a lot of cool people, you know, who I thought were cool, people were using it, it was kind of like this hot new technology. And so I had my eye on it, but I wanted to be able to write a chapter of the book that was like, Okay, here's how you compare this to Ruby on Rails. And as part of that, I was like, okay, maybe I should have a sample project, like a side project, I can build in Rails. And this is 2008. And, you know, the iPhone comes out, and I didn't get one on day one, eventually had to get one. Like later on down the line when jailbreaks were available because I was on a different cellular network. I didn't have at&t, and my company at the time paid my cell phone bill so it wasn't going to switch. And so so once I got my first iPhone, and I'm on Coming from like a Windows Mobile, like Windows mobile phone, it was the audio box kind of candy bar style. Just piece of junk. I mean, like, when you compare the two is like night and day, I couldn't believe how much different and the whole experience just like I would just sit there and scroll up and down. Because that experience just, uh, never had had anything like that in the Windows world or any, you know, obviously mobile computing world. And so, you know, my day job is doing, you know, web development on the Microsoft stack for these enterprise clients. And then at night, I'm like writing a Ruby on Rails, I built a Hackintosh. And so I could use a Mac and and I'm starting to like dabble with some iPhone programming. And I'm learning this through mostly through the Stanford courses that were available on iTunes you at the time. And, and, and also the Big Nerd Ranch, Objective C book, which is mostly about the Mac but, but I got to learn a lot about this sort of Objective C, language, and also kind of the style of development in that community, that cocoa kind of style of development with target action and selectors and delegates and things like that. So yeah, so that was kind of my foray into that world. And I built a guitar tablature app called Pocket tabs at the time. And because I'm a guitar player, and join the local Houston iPhone, users group, iPhone developers user group, and I was honestly initially kind of scared to join the group because I thought maybe, you know, I was wearing like, button up shirts and slacks. I was carrying my Windows laptop, you know, from work. And, you know, are they not going to be friendly to me, because I'm, like, come from the dark side, or whatever. And just the opposite was true. They were just such a welcoming crowd. And I'd have these really what, what now, I would say, those are dumb questions, or easy questions, rather. But they were kind of tripping me up at the time. And I just kind of just needed somebody to answer like, a few questions. I didn't realize like, how easy it was for them to answer my questions at the time, but I would kind of phrase, okay, I'm running into this problem. And somebody would just point it and be like, oh, yeah, there's your problem. Jeroen Leenarts: And it sounds, it sounds like that the the user group that you got involved with was kind of taking the role as your professor earlier, right. Ben Scheirman: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And, and just sort of that welcoming community is something that I've always tried to kind of pay forward. Because, because you never know, when somebody is just in that mode of, like I mentioned earlier about being kind of a sponge and ready to learn everything that doesn't come all the time. You know, it just, it's not here, for me most of the time. And so when it does arrive, when I feel like I'm in the mood to like learn something, and I'm, I'm excited. And and especially like, when you join like a new ecosystem, there's like lots to learn, right? If you say, I want to go learn JavaScript, well, there's a million tutorials, there's like 100 different ways you could learn it, you know. And so I think that finding the right voices of fight people that can be your mentors, or be your guides through that, whether it's like in person to person, or if it's through some online tutorial, following people's blogs, or YouTube channels, or whatever. So I really think that this sense of community is was one of the things that drew me to, to switch careers to say, Yeah, I can do this full time. And, and I like doing it. Jeroen Leenarts: So you were like, doing the corporate lifestyle, so to speak, and doing stuff in the evenings in your spare time, and, of course, dabbled with Ruby on Rails and got started with somewhat iOS related software development. What was the point in time that you felt like, Okay, now I'm gonna like jump ship, change my career, do something with mobile, just develop apps or something, two Ben Scheirman: things, two things were a factor there, one of them my guitar tablature app was pretty successful. This was back in the day where you could kind of throw any good idea at the store, and people are going to buy it. That's no longer true. But, but it was kind of nice that, you know, once I, once I kind of hacked together this app, I you know, I paid a designer friend of mine to design it. And, you know, looking back on it, it's just kind of hilarious to look at, but unfortunately, guitar tablature is kind of a legal minefield of problems. And it's not a good business model. So, so it drew some attention, and it was featured by Apple on Christmas Day, you know, during the holidays, so it got quite a few downloads, you know, I made a bunch of money off of it. I say a bunch of money. It was the most money I had ever made at that time. You know, in a single day or whatever, and it was just, I was like, Okay, well, step one, I'm buying a Mac because that's the I built the whole thing. I don't have Hackintosh cuz I didn't, I didn't have a Mac and I couldn't afford one. And so yeah, so that was like step one was that, you know, seemed like I had had found this kind of thing that is potentially viable, whether it's me joining a company or like making, you know, my own apps. Jeroen Leenarts: So basically saying that the success of that specific app, it was not a life changing amount of income, but it was such an amount that it's opened some doors in your own minds view that you were mentally ready to say, Okay, this is actually something that could have potential to create enough income to create a sustainable lifestyle. Ben Scheirman: Yeah, I mean, definitely not life, night life changing money, by any means. But but the problem was, is that all this attention the app was getting, it got the wrong attention. Also, it got the attention of some lawyers who, you know, sent me some strongly worded letters. And, you know, and I was very naive about the whole thing I was trying, I was so quick to get it on the store, I just put it on under my own personal name, I didn't, I didn't form a company or anything like that. And, you know, in hindsight, this is just like, incredibly reckless, because, you know, for those who aren't aware, you know, I'm sure this is very similar elsewhere. But if you, if if somebody side decides to sue you, and you launched in under your personal name, or now your house and all your assets are liable, you know, whereas if you create a company, you can isolate yourself from those sorts of things. Which, you know, in hindsight, I should have, you know, paid the 500 bucks or whatever, and started the company. But But yeah, that was, you know, lesson learned, that turned out fine in the end, but I did have to pull the app from the store. So around the same time that all this is happening, somebody came to the iPhone users group in Houston. And they said, they were looking for a new developer to join their team. Who knew dotnet and iPhone. And this is like, this is 2010. So you went like, Yes, please. Yeah. And the guy was like, I know, Ben, and there's, like, you know, probably nobody else in the world was certainly nobody else in Houston. Not that many people in the dotnet world also, were anti iPhone at that time. And so yeah, so we chatted, and it was difficult to go from a, you know, consulting, salary with benefits to a startup. But, you know, we ended up making it work and, and so like, financially, it was, more or less a lateral move. But it was kind of like, this is what I want to do. I'm tired of the Microsoft kind of ecosystem, I want to try something new. And I, you know, I'm having fun with being on the Mac, that and working and get instead of, you know, whatever. Jeroen Leenarts: So but then you made the switch to, to act to be an actual iOS developer. Yep. Ben Scheirman: So What year was this? That was 2010. Okay. Jeroen Leenarts: And so you were you are working there at a at a startup. So I reckon they were talking a lot about making a viable product and making launch dates and making sure that they have enough runway to keep going. So how much time did you spend at this company? Ben Scheirman: So I was there for five years. And I was, I think, employee number three. And then we eventually grew that company to 65 or so employees. And, you know, over the, over the time, I got to work on all kinds of great, you know, great products, cool ideas, and work with some really great people, some great designers. But I had also, you know, two years after I joined that, I also started in a screencast. And that, you know, struck a chord with the community, I think that, you know, the initial launch was pretty successful, and it was just continually growing. And so it was a nice, you know, side income for a while, and the, you know, the more I worked on that, the more I was thinking, you know, if I ever wanted to be independent, you know, I think for most people, they're like, should I quit my job and, you know, become independent. You know, they have to, like, save up a ton of money ahead of time, so that they can not, you know, if things don't work out, you know, they have something to fall back on. You know, so in my, in my case, I feel like I had kind of like a, like a parachute, rather than just jumping off a cliff, you know, I had I had some income, they wouldn't necessarily replace my salary. You know, and I couldn't live off of it entirely, but it was, it was a way for me to say, Okay, I've got enough in the bank where I can, I can try this, this that and the other for a few months and kind of see where it takes me. And so it was it was easier for me to make that decision because I had some residual income from the screencasting business. And yeah, so I you know, I did some teaching. You know, I taught a class in China, which was a lot of fun, iOS development, and then and then, you know, landed The independent contracts. And so I've been doing that kind of, you know, screencasting plus, you know, independent contracting for, for clients. Sometimes it's, you know, joining a larger team, and sometimes it's training and sometimes it's, you know, leading, like, multiple developers on a cross platform products, you know, including a back end server API and stuff like that. And so I've just, you know, I've worked on quite quite a few things over the years, but I've just been pretty fortunate that you know, I haven't, I've never really had to, like, market myself a lot in that sense, because I've, you know, speak at conferences, and I people know, me for many screencasts, and things like that, it's like, it certainly helps. Jeroen Leenarts: So besides no screencast, you do some freelancing on the side, so to speak. So your, your, your side project is to freelancing to be able to fill in the gaps that might arise financially due to a slower month with no screencasts, for example, or Yeah, Ben Scheirman: I would say in a screencast is more steady than the in the freelancing, but but in terms of time spent, you know, it's probably half and half at this point. And it comes and goes, like, you know, and when COVID hit my client, who, at the time was like, yeah, sorry, we gotta let all contractors go like tomorrow. And, you know, there's no hard feelings, but that was just kind of the financial reality. And, and these are things that you have to plan for, and stuff like that. And, and so that, you know, that that hurt a bit. But again, I have to the subscription income that can help smooth over those times. So, you know, when that when that happens, you know, hopefully, hopefully, it's not too long. And, you know, I've been, again, fortunate that, you know, there are lots of jobs that still can't operate fully, you know, Jeroen Leenarts: but you were able to create a large addition to your enter screencast catalog with a combined course, am I correct? Ben Scheirman: Yeah, it is a separate product. But yeah, I had had this idea in my head for a while, in fact, just recording some content about combine, in general, was on was on my mind, in fact, I had, I spoke at ns, Spain last year, last year. And the topic was kind of asynchronous programming and swift and kind of talking about the different patterns and, and the talk was largely around how promises can, you know, clean up asynchronous workflows, and give you some kind of new building blocks to work with? And in that talk, I kind of made a joke about how combine is really hard to learn. I do know, Alex Honnold is the guy who, who scaled El Capitan, free solo. So I showed a picture of him. And and the caption on the thing was this mountain cliff, you know, does anybody know what the name of it is? And you know, that the joke was that it's called combines learning curve, you know, just a straight up wall. And, you know, I still think that's kind of true. But, but that was kind of my, my initial kind of reaction to these frameworks. And so when I, whenever I sat down to do this, and I had the same problem with reactive cocoa, back in the day, before Swift was around, and RX swift came around, and again, it just none of these things ever clicked with me. I even read books on it. And I still felt ill equipped to actually do it in a client project. In fact, I thought that maybe that was irresponsible to like, come on a new project and use a framework that, you know, puts the puts them in a position where now they have to hire people that No, no, that thing. So this is, you know, that's probably a topic, we could talk about a long time of whether that's a responsible decision or not as a contractor, right? If your client is full of developers who can either already know that this kind of style of programming, or can I learn it quickly, then maybe this is a fantastic choice. But anyway, so this was kind of always my internal struggle is that it was, it was a little difficult to learn. And it was a big, kind of architectural imposition on a project, right. And so when combined comes around, it's kind of more of the same, but this time, things are a little bit different. A, it's from Apple, and when, let's be honest, it's kind of like, you know, back in the day, people said, Nobody ever got fired from choosing for choosing Microsoft, you know, that or, you know, that same quote, Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, like, you know, before my time. There is definitely that, that sense of comfort that people will have and say, well, at least I know that Apple is going to support it. And if I go find another developer off the street, the chances are that they're going to probably know that framework because it comes from Apple, you know, maybe not some some of the third party ones. And so that's kind of why I chose to, to start focusing on combine and and I couldn't really find a way to fit it into the NS screencast model. I have, you know, I try, I tried to do like 10 minute videos, basically, but it's, you know, most of them are 10 to 20 minutes long, you know, I want to like, teach something really quickly, that's useful. And let somebody get on with their day, I don't want to talk for an hour. That gets boring, and it takes forever to edit. And, and, you know, people, people are busy, you know. And so if you can teach something quickly, in 10 minutes, then great. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, combined as a topic is not really bite sized. Exactly. Yeah. And that's one of the selling arguments you have on your screencasts websites, if I'm correct. So being more at home due to circumstances allows you to create this additional piece of content in your portfolio. And you've recently launched it, I think, Ben Scheirman: yeah, so I'm still actually working on it. I had a, did some writing on the course just kind of sketching out what I thought it would be. And then I, you know, went on some quests, to use it in the wild, you know, and on sample projects, and some some other stuff I was working on. So I could get some more experience. And I talked to people and I would kind of refactor my outline, and I was in that state for a really long time trying to figure out the best way to teach it. And then, and then, you know, this the pandemic hit, and all of a sudden, I have, you know, all this time to work on it. And so, you know, I haven't been working on it since March. But basically, I was like, I'm not going to be presented with this, quote, unquote, opportunity to not have an actual client obligation. You know, and so when, when there was some, like periods of time here and there, where I had, like, some client work that was occupying my time, but I had a good solid month where no client work. And so I think this was back in, like, between July and August, basically, is when I started kind of in full force and saying, okay, yep, I want to do this, and I think it deserves its own course. And that way, I'm not like, if I need to record like a one minute video that's like, here's how you use this operator, I don't want that to like, show up in the feed of any screencasts. That makes sense. Because that's, you know, it's part of a larger picture, and it should fit the course, not fit the feed, if that makes sense. You know, and I want people to to see the logical groupings, and, and so, so yeah, anyway, this is, you know, and it's also an experiment for me to try a different style of delivering content rather than kind of topical 10 to 20 minute thing to try and cover like a whole topic that I can be kind of a go to reference for. And I seemingly picked a good one at a good time, because combined didn't change a whole lot in iOS 14. I was a little bit worried it would, because I was already kind of planning on the course when WWDC hit. But yeah, so almost nothing changed. And, and so I was like, Okay, this is a good time, because I was 14 is coming out. And a lot of people are kind of, you know, current version minus one. So most most people I talked to will support iOS 13. And that means they can use combined. And, yeah, so that's, it's kind of a good, good timing on my part. And so I opened the course for early access at the end of October. And, yeah, so early feedback has been fantastic. And I'm really excited to, you know, wrap up the remaining bits of the course. And I also, because I'm a dork, I decided to write my own course platform, which has also like added to the amount of time it takes to actually deliver this thing, but, but I'm kind of picky about the experience. You know, Jeroen Leenarts: it's one of the things why would you do that? Well, because I can i Yeah, high engineer Ben Scheirman: here. I, you know, I looked at some of the off the shelf ones, and there's some good products out there. But if you want it to work a certain way, I don't know. Yeah, it's it's sometimes to my detriment, but in this case, I think that I built it in a way that I can add more courses to it later. And so far, it's been working, working well. Jeroen Leenarts: So the reception of your combined course has been above your expectations Ben Scheirman: are good. Yeah. Yeah, so I had some friends go through it early. Like while I was still building it out, and, and their feedback was fantastic. And one of them, one of my friends just went through the rest of what I have available. And he's he says, I have all that my only remaining feedback is, you know, applause emoji and so and so I'm I'm just I'm just excited because you know, when you build something like this, it's sometimes it's, you don't know if if it's kind of like if you build it they will come or not and I'm not the best marketing person in the world. And I know that when you follow people's advice about marketing, you should be you know, pre selling and you should be validating and stuff and, and really what I have is I have a small audience on Twitter, you know, compared to, compared to other people who are successful doing this. And, and, you know, I have my, what I would consider like a genuine honesty about a given technology, I'm like trying not to oversell it, and I'm trying not to oversell my own abilities, you know, like, I, I just learned, combine and started playing with it, and I got excited about and I want to share that excitement, you know, with, with other people, like, look at what I could take this jumbled mess, and I can convert it into this thing. And I'm not only like, does it look better, and I can test it, but I'm like, way more confident in that code. Because I can just look at it. And I know what's happening under the hood. You know, it's kind of like a mechanic can kind of pop the hood of a car, and they can look at all these parts, I have no idea what's going on under there. But you know, that that sort of expertise, you can only grow by like jumping in and doing it. And so I feel like, you know, you know, I guess to circle back to like, the marketing aspect is, you know, I probably did it wrong by producing a whole lot of the course upfront before I let anyone see it, but Jeroen Leenarts: it increases your risk. But yeah, that's but um, if you look at you as a as a person, because most of the things that we talked about thus far is about the professional work that you do. What are things that that make you tick, you already mentioned and I see it in the background because we run video that you you like playing guitars, are there any other interesting or maybe even strange hobbies that you practice? Ben Scheirman: See, I like to solder. When I was younger, I got into the mud ship scene for modding my, the original PlayStation, which was a lot of fun, so I had to learn how to solder. And so lately, I've been teaching my son who's 11 how to solder and so he, we have this kind of box of like, random electronic parts. And he was making a, like a cardboard airplane. And so he found some really cheap, they're supposed to be like DRONE PROPELLERS. But, you know, showed him I'm like, Okay, well, you know, what the voltage rating of the each of these things are, and we've got this double A battery pack. So what's going to happen if we use two batteries versus four batteries or whatever? And yeah, some, some soldering and some super glue. And we had this gigantic plane that didn't fly, but it was a lot of fun to build. So yeah, that was so that's, you know, kind of like tinkering with electronics is kind of fun. I'm also into barbecue. I grew up in Oregon, actually, where, you know, people would say barbecue. And that means like grilling outdoors. And if you go eat brisket, I'd never liked brisket as a kid because it was gross. It was just dry meat. And so when I moved to Texas, I just avoided barbecue places. I moved to Texas when I was 13. And so So eventually, I came to really love Texas barbecue, especially, you know, Texas style brisket and and now I have a smoker and I kind of do it the right way. And and, you know, it's just fun. I've cooked for like 100 people before. Wow. And people are like, Oh, where'd you Where'd you get this from? And I just point at my smoker, you know? And so yeah, that's, that's been fun. Jeroen Leenarts: So if you look at the regular week for you, so how many hours I like busy on the business side of things. So that's the end of screencasts are doing freelancing, creating course material, and how much time do you spend on that each week? Ben Scheirman: That's a really hard question. Because I work from home, it's really hard to and especially, you know, as you can see behind me, I've got guitars and I've got a gaming computer right there. And it's, it's sometimes hard to draw the line between work and non work. I've heard some advice from some people that say like, just turn off your computer have a different computer for like leisurely things and don't do it in the same room. Unfortunately, this is just kind of like my room where I, I hang out and, and, and so you know, it, it sometimes is when when people work from home, they end up working more than less. You know, now that I don't have a commute and I haven't had a commute for many years, I end up spending that time working. Like I usually work in my pajamas for a little while before I actually go get ready. Just because, you know after once I sit down a coffee, you know, so you know sometimes I think that I can overwork a bit. But I I have been better about keeping weekends just for family stuff and you know, enjoying you know, I bake bread. So, you know usually, you know, once every couple of weeks I'll I'll bake something and I've also gotten really into cooking in the last Few years. So my wife, who, who did most of the cooking, she was doing her master's degree, like, well, also teaching. And so, so it was kind of like, all of a sudden, I had to do like all of the meals, you know. Jeroen Leenarts: And so it sounds like that you have somebody at home who kind of like, keeps you in check to make sure that you don't spend too much time. In your, in your cave, so to speak. Yeah. Is that correct? Ben Scheirman: Yeah, I mean, how are we have we have busy lives, we have five kids, three of whom are adults, children, and are out of the house now and, you know, in college and, and grown, but then we have two twins who are 11. And so they're doing, you know, distance learning from home. So it is kind of interesting that we all kind of meet in the kitchen to fill up our water bottles, and, and then we go back to my office in their bedroom, so they could finish school. And, and, yeah, so we've got dogs, we go on walks and stuff like that. Jeroen Leenarts: It sounds like your leisure time is is already packed to the brim with other activities as well. So but which is good, because that's a whole different type of things, then only working all the time. Because I must say that at some times, you do put out a lot of videos in quite a short amount of time, I think. So if you look at one of those videos, you say that you aim for a format of 10 minutes, maybe 20? How much time does it actually take two produce one of these videos, and I'm not talking about the studying and the getting to know the actual code and getting the concepts in your mind. But then, once you have the concepts, producing the content, how much work is that actually, Ben Scheirman: let's say is for like a 20 minute video, it really depends on the style that you choose. In my case, I like the style of I hit record, and I just do it all. And if it's bad, or if I make a mistake, I can kind of back up if it's really bad, I just throw it away and start over. You could script everything out ahead of time. And that's a different field, it's a different style. And mine is mine is much more geared toward, you know, if you and I were sitting in the same room, and I'm like, okay, hey, I want to show you this thing. And we pass the keyboard back and forth that sort of kind of style. And so, so that actually lends itself well to if I know it really well I can do it in one take, you know, with few mistakes, you would think I would have a better control over not saying um, but I say it all the time. I'm really bad at it. So I try to cut those things out where there were where it happens. And you know, if I say something or stumble on my words, I'll just stop and say that thing again. So, you know, I might record for 26 minutes or something, and then edit that down to 20. And there'll be some spaces in there and stuff like that, but Jeroen Leenarts: and then some post production to add all the artwork. Ben Scheirman: Yeah, so and I've gone back and forth, sometimes I will, you know, I have somebody who can edit for me. But there's some creative control that you give up there. And sometimes it's not exactly what you'd want, through no fault of their own, because a person is not a developer. And it's not their product either. And so they just kind of, you know, will edit it how they see fit. And then, you know, over time, I've had a few different people create artwork for the site, because I wanted to have kind of a unique piece of artwork for each video. And so I'm not an artist, I know how to use sketch and gradients. Basically, and, and, you know, little shapes here and there. And so for a lot of these videos, I will pay somebody to to make some kind of unique artwork. So like one recent one that I really liked was, I was covering a caching library called pigeon. And the the back end API that I wanted to cache was the Star Wars API, which is Swappi dot Dev, which is a cool API you can use to tinker around with the networking code and to get a response and be able to parse those responses, Jason and that sort of thing. And so my designer came up with this amazing pigeon carrying a lightsaber. And, and so yeah, it's it's stuff like that, that I just can't do on my own. And, and so I try to do that. On occasion, though, it does get kind of expensive to do custom artwork for every single episode, Jeroen Leenarts: especially if you let it be done by somebody else. Ben Scheirman: Yeah, and those people are professionals, and they deserve to be paid for their time. And so, Jeroen Leenarts: okay, well, I will be talking about a lot of things already. Actually, this was one of the easiest interviews I have done thus far. So thank you for that. Are there any books are resources that you would recommend besides your own content, of course, for people who are either getting started with iOS development or who are already heavily involved In iOS development, I want to take a next step. Ben Scheirman: Yeah, I think we live in a great time where there's lots of lots of choices. I follow lots of other developers in the space. I really like the objective CIO, what's it called swift talk site because Chris I'd hoffen, Florian, Kugler, they cover things from a different angle than oftentimes I would even consider, and I always learned a lot by watching their videos. And I would say that's, you know, considerably more advanced than this stuff than most stuff that that we come across. And I would say, for beginners, I've always enjoyed Paul Hudson's, you know, hacking with Swift comm I always found his, especially his videos that he's been making on YouTube. He knows what he's talking about. And he is kind of genuine in his delivery. And, and, yeah, I just like his style a lot. He's just an overall great person. So yeah, in terms of like, video content, I like those a lot. Let's see, books, I'm trying to think of what books I've read recently. So I eventually kind of exhaust all of the books that cover those specific topics, like, you know, I have an AV foundation book and a Core Data Book and, and stuff like that. And once you learn those, like, there's not going to be 15 others for you to learn from, right. And so I have kind of migrated away from reading technical books to reading books that are more around business or learning. So one, that one that comes to mind that's on my shelf right now is Deep Work by Cal Newport. And it's a, you know, in the book, it talks about how you can get, you know, truly great work done, it requires immense focus. And there's something that in this day and age, it's really hard to come by, and so how can you, you know, you know, increase your chances of success, so to speak, by eliminating distractions and, and, you know, paying attention to, to a problem to a level where you can actually, you know, dive in really deep, that book kind of has been really helpful for me, because I find myself when being at home with lots of distractions around I find myself being distracted a lot. And then sometimes, you know, to solve certain kinds of problems, you really have to be in that headspace, you know, and so that's it, that's a good book, Jeroen Leenarts: I will make sure to link that one from, from the show notes, as I've actually read that book as well. And it's, it's truly a good book to have on your shelf. And actually, I've read it, Ben Scheirman: his his other book, so good, they can't ignore you, that's a good one as well, that's a fantastic one, it just, just be awesome. And, you know, that's an excellent marketing strategy, Jeroen Leenarts: just linked books, and then people can can read the reviews on on Amazon. And that'll probably convince them that they might have to put it in the basket. We basically took a tour along your career as a software developer, you started way back in the day, with Q basic when you were really young. And then you went on to, to college, got some work done with, let's see with Microsoft dotnet technology eventually, before that ASP, then you went into iOS development, because you grew an interest into that. And along the way, you've you've met a professor that actually has helped you out, you've met a community. And actually, you got into iOS development, because you because you knew a guy who knew somebody else, which landed you a interview at a company and actually gave you the opportunity to make the move. Are there any other people that you would consider in your professional life, to have been instrumental in getting you to the place where you are right now? Ben Scheirman: That's a that's a hard question. Because there are so many people that I mean, usually I point to my professor, because he and he and I still talk it, his name is Venkat Subramanyam. And he's written books for Prague press before, you know, I have a couple of his books on my shelf right now. But he, you know, he was the one who got me into agile development, not, you know, he didn't sell it to me, and he just like, I was eager to learn and he would point to a thing and I would go, you know, learn about that and then come back with questions and he would tell me more. And, and so he and I've kept up, you know, over the years and, you know, when I tell him how much he changed my whole career path, you know, he brushes it off, but but I feel like just there are those people in your life that that make a difference and you know, to the person, it seems like nothing But to you, it seems like well, if I hadn't met that person, then maybe I wouldn't even like programming right now. Yeah, you know, in so that, you know, he's usually the one that comes to mind. But also my wife has been insanely supportive of, you know, me doing after hours things, you know, writing books or recording screencasts while doing a full time job or, you know, teaching a class in China for two weeks while she takes care of literally everything else. And so, you know, having supportive partners, has also been really, I think, instrumental to where I am today. Jeroen Leenarts: I think that would wrap it up for today. At my place, it's actually evening. But yeah, there you have it, people, Ben, he's been doing software development for quite a while. And he's the guy behind me screencast. But lots of things. We'll keep doing that for quite a while. I think. So Ben, thank you very much for your time and all the wonderful information that you were willing to share with me. Ben Scheirman: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's It's not often I get to dig into my backstory and and talk about all this stuff. Yeah, thanks. It's been great. Jeroen Leenarts: If you want to leave feedback, leave a [email protected] slash app force.