Dan Vega

Coffee & Code Newsletter: #18

Welcome to Coffee and Code with me, Dan Vega. This newsletter is a little insight into what I was up to this week, things I found interesting and anything on my radar for the upcoming week. If you missed last week's newsletter you can checkout Coffee and Code #17 here. If you don't already have a cup of coffee grab one now and let's get to it.

Previous Week

It has been a busy week for me wrapping up some work projects as I get a nice little vacation next week. With that let's get right into it.

Spring Boot in Visual Studio Code Blog Post

A few weeks ago I created a new tutorial for YouTube that showed you how to create a Spring Boot application in Visual Studio Code. I created this is a video tutorial for YouTube but what I have been struggling to figure out is how can I reuse this content on my blog.

If users are reading my blog posts and come across this post with the video my hope is that If they find value in it I can gain them as a subscriber over on YouTube. My first thought was I can just create a new post, embed the video and be done with it.

That is the path of least resistance for me but I have some problems with it. This doesn't add any value to the video or even give the reader a reason to watch it. It also doesn't have any text which means it won't be picked it up by the search engines which begs the point why have a blog post at all?

Failing Fast

My first attempt this week was to order a transcription of the entire video using rev.com. I was going to add the video to the blog post and then a transcription of the video below it. My initial thoughts were that this wasn't going to be very helpful and I was right. After reading through it I realized that nobody was going to read this and it wasn't very search engine friendly.

Another attempt was to create an actual blog post like I normally would if I wanted to teach someone how to create a Spring Boot project in Visual Studio Code. I got about half way through this post and I was not having fun at all. I think it was because I already created this tutorial but I was having a hard time getting through it so I scrapped it.

A Solution

I finally found a result that I was happy with and you can read it here. Yes I embedded the YouTube video in the blog post but I also gave some context as to what this video was about without giving you the whole tutorial in text. I also got some good feedback on Twitter from a few folks. I can add things like code snippets if its code that someone might want to copy or even timestamps to point out where things in the video take place. I really like that and I think it adds value.

Spring Boot in VS Code

https://www.danvega.dev/blog/2019/11/21/spring-boot-visual-studio-code/

Content Syndication: What are you doing?

If you're still reading this (give yourself a high-five) I would love to know what you think of the short form post and the video embed. I am also curious to hear what others are doing in this scenario. I have a full-time job, a family and hobbies. I only have so much time each week to produce content and I am constantly striving to be efficient with my time.

Around the Web

These are things I found cool around the web this week.

Articles

Videos

Podcasts

Projects

Newsletters

Courses

Until Next Week

Thanks for sitting down and sharing a cup of coffee with me my friend. I hope you enjoyed this installment of Coffee & Code and I will see you next Sunday morning. If you have any links you would like me to include please contact me and I might add them to a future newsletter. I hope you have a great week and as always friends...

Happy Coding
Dan Vega
[email protected]
https://www.danvega.dev