 Happy New Year everybody. It is New Year's Eve 2018. We'll be ringing in 2019 very shortly And in case you have no idea what this video is once a year Usually New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, I will sit down and I will make a video It's kind of a video blog of what I've done throughout the year and what I'm going to be doing next year. So Wow 2018 what a wild ride. This has been It seems like just yesterday I was sitting down doing this for ringing in 2018. This whole year is just flown by I've been very busy and you wouldn't know that if you were following my YouTube channel because YouTube has been almost dead And there's a reason for that The year started off where I was approached by Q They wanted me to do some official videos for them So I've started doing official videos for them and you can find those out in the Resources and then you can go under development tech talks and tutorials and pretty much if it starts with blue screen it has my name That's me recording it That being said these are shorter videos. They're under 10 minutes But that 10 minute video may take weeks, and I mean literally weeks That's because they're structured a very differently. They're a lot more professional and They cover material at a very rapid pace It's not like my normal video where you'll see me sitting there typing. It's a lot of video editing and Admittedly sometimes things didn't go as planned For example using Qt creator on Linux. Sometimes I would do a QML example and halfway through Qt creator just crashes. So the window just disappears. It's gone So I'd have to start the whole thing over. So what I've really learned is I would program in chunks so I would actually Write the code and then do a few dry runs and then find my stopping points because if that Qt creator crashes or if I become tongue-tied or I make a mistake I have to have some visual reference on the screen that I can stop at Bring Qt creator right back up and then start all over again. You think about that. It's not as easy as it is if you're 30 30 lines into a program and then you shut the computer off and come back How do you visually make everything on the screen exactly like it was? It was pretty big challenge The other real challenge for these videos is that they are on the other side of the planet. So there's that time difference Language really wasn't an issue. I think a lot of the issue is just different goals They really want to aggressively market their stuff, which you can't blame them I mean they need to market in order to make money But I'm more of a you know, this is how you do things step-by-step kind of guy And it was just a mental shift for me going from step one two three to hey look at what this technology stack can do And I don't think all of my videos are even out there. I don't think they published them all yet But the last round had Qt for Python. So they are generating some interest in other Languages not just C++ and they're really trying to showcase what this technology can do and if you've really been following They've been aggressively pushing and trying to get more subscribers I think they're 27,000 and change and I think that's grown a few thousand in the last year So they're definitely getting some interest in their technology stack and I think as a company They're really growing and maturing at a rapid pace Void realms with it's 62,000 and change subscribers. This just keeps steadily growing. I Hate to say it, but I don't really invest a whole lot of my time into this probably not as much as I should I just publish videos whenever I can I do try to be very invested in the community. There's a void realms Facebook group So if you're out on Facebook, I know lately Facebook is considered evil But if you're out on Facebook join the void realms Facebook group If you have no idea how to get there, you just go to my website void realms go to contact And then you just click this join the void realms Facebook group link And it'll take you right to it. You can join up there is at the time of this recording about Just under 3,000 developers in there I would love it absolutely love it if we could get like all 62,000 people in there The the Facebook group is just amazing because it can be three in the morning and I can post a question And somebody's instantly popping back on an answer. I mean, it's like real time and Sometimes those answers are very helpful. Sometimes they're like, hey, have you tried Google? So but it's just the fact that you can talk to another human being pretty much 24 hours a day and get Feedback from somebody who knows the technology you're working with it's just amazing to me. That just simply didn't exist years and years ago So anyways with the void realms. I haven't been as active as I usually am You can see this year. I really haven't posted a whole lot of videos. I Kind of started with flutter and went down that technology stack and anytime I deviate from cute all the cute folks get all upset But I really wanted to learn flutter At the time of those recordings I didn't think that cute was kind of up to par in the mobile development realm as much as say flutter is Which is really weird because flutter was an alpha when I was recording this. They weren't even in beta yet The flutter is definitely going to be a technology to watch moving forward It's got really tight integration with everything Google Which means you've got Google sign-in firebase things like that adding in Facebook logins and things of that nature is very very simple It's just gonna be an amazing technology. However Cute is an amazing technology and I think they're really adding in some things that are just gonna make this compete head-on with everything else so Begs a question if I have not been doing YouTube what have I been doing? Well, I've been really working on something called you to me You can visit you to me calm and you can search for me or you just search for whatever technology you're looking for and This sprang about because I had One person approached me and one person turned to ten turned a hundred turned to a thousand Literally thousands of emails from people saying Love your videos. I Love your teaching style, but I cannot walk into a job interview and say hey, I watch this dude's videos Instead, can you make a classroom? So that's what you to me is it's a virtual classroom And originally I wanted to give these all away just dead free The problem is the more traffic I drive away from YouTube and from my official page the less Donations I get because this site's a hundred percent funded by donations So yeah, I mean sitting here recording these videos has a very real impact on my life because it takes time and energy away from all the other things I like to do Not making millions and millions of dollars trust me If I did I'd be recording this from a beach in Maui or something like that But anyways, it just helps fund the recording of more classes So I started with Dart and I was actually blown away that these became best sellers and highest rated And I'm now moving into the cute stack and the cute core for beginners Became a best-seller cute core intermediate literally just published this These things are amounts these are very time-consuming It's 10 hours of solid video along with Quizzes and exercises and things like that and that 10 hours of video actually takes me about two months of Recording practicing editing. I of course make mistakes. I have to go back and fix There's engagement in the classroom and things of that nature and when you're done with all this I think Udemy gives you a nice certificate of completion that you can slap onto your resume and go get a job with so That's been kind of one of my focuses is really making these into official classes And I want to take pretty much everything that I know And I actually know a lot more than what I have in my profile, but you think about it you know all these languages and Make a beginner's intermediate in advance and then like different frameworks and different certifications like sysp and Microsoft Linux a plus network plus VM where you know things of that nature in different technologies like Cisco UCS SQL IS vCenter Blah blah blah on and on but you think of just one technology stack and how long that takes so for example cute I've taken cute core and I've split into beginners intermediate advanced. Well, that's just the core That's things like, you know cue string and sockets and threading and stuff like that So there's a beginner's intermediate advanced at that each one of those takes about a month and a half to two months So just to go through cute core Takes about four to six months. That's a lot of recording. So This will definitely keep me busy for the foreseeable future just taking everything I know I'm putting it into some sort of official classroom format and throwing it out on Udemy Now I'm not going to forget about YouTube because I love just the whimsical nature of YouTube how I can just record something No video editing completely not caring and making a lot of mistakes and then learning from those mistakes in real time I Definitely like doing that, but my videos. I've been trying to get a little more professional. I've been diving into video editing Something I'm not very fond of but I've definitely been learning it and I've been trying to stay away from those cheesy transitions, but So that's really what I've been focused on along with just void realms. I really need to just go through and redo this whole website I Have moved all of the source code for the tutorials up to GitHub That was a monumental effort until I learned how to script that So pretty much everything that I've ever written for void realms is up on GitHub right now But my time has been very limited because I got a promotion at work Pretty hefty one when I say hefty I mean in responsibility So I have been working a lot of hours and that's been taking away from everything else And I've also been trying to just unplug I spend a lot of time on the computer So I bought a house and of course when you buy a house You have to paint the walls and all that and I'm looking around and there's no artwork on the walls Like nothing is just like a prison in here So I've been buying canvas art from this site called wish comm and as it comes in I've been building my own Canvas stretcher bars and stretching and stapling the canvas and then hanging it up on the wall So I've been putting some artwork around the house Last but certainly not least I've gotten engaged. I've never been very lucky and love I don't know many people who have but hopefully this is the one. I really love this woman knock on wood hopefully everything works out and And if you notice, there's no extra tabs. So what am I going to be doing in? 2019 well pretty much everything that we talked about I'm going to be really pushing hard on you to me and that'll be the bulk of my focus Cute has reached out and contacted me again about doing potentially some more videos There's some back-and-forth and some questions going on there, but really my focus is just going to be on friends family Actually reverse that family friends and then you know the void rums channel and you to me so More to come and I look forward to 2019 and I hope to see you guys there if you have any Comments or any ideas for maybe some courses on you to me or videos out on YouTube. Let me know I'll definitely take a look at them and see what I can do