Well, the channel has hit 50,000 subscribers. Which is awesome! Hooray for us! Thank you very
much! So this channel also was featured as 13th in machine learning youtube channels by KD-Nuggets.
Which is also quite awesome! So on to a hundred thousand! You can certainly help me do that. Click
that subscribe button! Click the like button! Now I don't know milestone videos can be quite boring.
So I don't want to bore you necessarily with a lot of, I don't know hooray for the channel sort
of stuff. What I'm going to do instead is talk to you about kind of how you can move forward in
social media for a coding technical channel, kind of like what I have. Where I took it,
how you get to kind of, I'm going to talk about really five levels. Now there are a billion
people talking about YouTube and how to succeed at YouTube. Uh so everybody really, and well
their dog, so to make this at least halfway useful I think it's good because I'm
not a gigantic YouTuber. I've got 50k people, but that's not trivial to get to, by any stretch,
so I'm going to talk to you really about some steps that you would take if you're interested in
really getting your code, your projects, out there and even how you might think about a project. So
let's go ahead. I'll start with showing you just how I record these videos, do the quote-unquote
studio tour, and then I'll just talk about what I consider to be the five stages of growth for this.
And we'll also talk about some of the cardinal sins, I think of YouTube. I broke them all,
I've committed them all, so I'll show you and you can learn from my many, many mistakes and
I'm probably making even more mistakes on this particular video, but this is the growth. This
is how you learn and move forward. This is probably close to the angle that you see.
Most of my videos recorded from these are all shot from my home office which is a spare bedroom. This
is very much a family space. Just to show you the area over here, is where my wife has been teaching
virtual school during the COVID crisis. She's got quite the setup with a green screen. You can
see her here as she's getting ready to teach a class. Uh, other members of the family are also
allowed to be in here. That's hickory you've, heard him occasionally snore-bomb a video. Mostly
I keep his audio effects out of it. He's a very sweet English Bulldog. Going around to here,
this is how I shoot the videos. The computer is sitting that's, I mean the uh the workstation
with the rainbow LED going on. That is my primary workstation. It dual boots between
Windows and Linux. It's a pretty advanced computer, I have entire videos on it, and
NVIDIA was kind enough to give me the A6000, that is what it runs on. I have there a surface laptop
the primary thing that it does is runs my camera and you can see it there my camera
is not crazy advanced. It's a Canon M50 mirrorless camera. I've got a couple of lenses for it.
I do have I could potentially get a better lens that is closer to me, but I have a USB connection
to the laptop so that I can control it remotely. Mostly I want to get the autofocus set up on me,
well so that it's not constantly bouncing in and out of autofocus if I happen to move around a bit,
and then of course Hickory has his spot that he can sleep in here when I'm working on things. And
you can see some of his toys. He's a good boy, snores very loudly. That's the main challenge
when a video is shot the window is a bit of a challenge you can see that I have it blocked out
otherwise I am just crazy exposed. Like you see in this video or sometimes the lighting would
even literally change as the sun went in front of and behind clouds. So this is basically the
home office, where I record my videos and where I run most of the code as I get things working
on that computer back there. So these are what I really consider the stages of growth.
At least that I went through for this YouTube channel. First, I would say choose a project.
Find something that really interests you and this is great for any sort of a learning process.
We'll talk about what to pick for the project in a moment, but something that interests you.
Now I've been doing projects all really all my life. I mean I started programming probably back
in like fourth grade and always created something. Now if you just create something and you don't
ever do anything with it, it's just code rotting on a disk somewhere and nobody will ever see it.
You'll probably lose it. I can't find half the code that I produced back when I was an undergrad
and sometimes I want to go back and look at it. Now GitHub exists, now you can put I would say
the next step is getting your code on GitHub, even if it's just mainly you that's going to go to look
at it. But it gets you to the point that you're putting something on GitHub and you're really
getting it into a state that you're not embarrassed by other people to look at it. And
that sounds harsh but don't worry there is a lot of code at all levels on GitHub,
so don't let that deter you. But try to try to put your best face on the code that you
are that you're going to put there now from GitHub. where I would suggest is do a Medium
article do some sort of a posting to LinkedIn or I mean LinkedIn and Medium or Twitter. Those
are really the big three that I use. once I put something together that's kind of neat on GitHub
and very much YouTube has become the pinnacle of what I do on social media.
But this is really just me throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
For some reason of all the paths that I blazed people seem to care most about the YouTube videos.
Twitter not as much but lately, I mean I'm almost to 10k followers on Twitter. So Twitter by virtue
of my YouTube channel has started to grow. So as much as you can sort of double-dip on these
and post what you write something on GitHub, do a video about it, post that on LinkedIn, post it on
Twitter, basically just see what you get and let the likes sort of guide you.
I don't, you'll hear a lot about the YouTube Algorithm. I don't really care about the YouTube
algorithm. I probably lost all credibility there as a YouTube promoter and maybe that's why I have
50,000 subscribers instead of 500k, but I do what I'm interested in. And I let basically the YouTube
Algorithm find me a following that fits, that I'm not going to chase the YouTube algorithm,
like a squirrel, and try to try to basically feed it to get more and more subscribers.
This is really and this is also really a hobby for me. I full-time work as an
executive in a large insurance company, in data science solving hard technology problems. So
this is very much a hobby for me. This is something that's fun that I do.
the next thing to do and I would recommend this is done the faceless video. Getting your face
on YouTube is it adds a lot of extra dimensions. Suddenly you're a video engineer and an audio
engineer and all these additional things. And it's just an endless rabbit hole. You're learning about
lenses on cameras and aperture and lighting and all that kind of stuff. Don't get overwhelmed
by that. Honestly, my face is the least important part of these videos. Do you agree? Let me know in
the comments. Maybe I'm not necessarily thinking of that the right the right way but basically,
just hook up your use screencasting software. There's plenty of them out there.
Screencast-o-Matic is one that I started with. Then graduated into Camtasia and now I even
dabble in Adobe Premiere Pro. But just walk people through it. Show them the code show them
the output from it. Use a Jupyter Notebook if you're doing Python.
That kind of thing. So but get great audio. We'll talk about that in a moment. The YouTuber
audience will forgive you for bad lighting, for not being at the right point in the camera, not
making eye contact with the audience, all these kinds of bad things, they will forgive you for.
They won't forgive you for audio. I get more criticism. And I mean criticism in a good way. I
don't mind, in the least, on audio when I screw up audio I hear about it. So that's
we'll talk about that one in a minute. Then if you want to start adding video and I mean video
coming from a camera, not video captured from your screen. That's a whole nother
realm. And it gets you into the world of maybe using things more than just a
cell phone camera, but the cell phone camera is a great thing to get started the whole studio
tour that I gave you just earlier was filmed on this. So notice the audio, notice the video, the
smaller cameras like the one that I'm using right now. That's mounted on my computer it just doesn't
have the aperture of something like the Canon that I use. So it's very unforgiving of lighting.
You have to add the light to there's just not as much that I can do there. I actually don't use
lights on any of my videos. This room has the window that I showed you. And usually, it's
just controlling that window's light so that I don't look like I'm on fire uh with overexposure.
Then stage five, which I'm starting to get to more and more, which is just I don't know using the
green screen as you can probably see behind me. Bringing in animations. I mean good grief, um some
of the bringing in animations doing that sort of thing some of the channels out there are amazing.
Actual at this and then beyond. I don't know what stages six, seven, eight, and nine look like.
Uh, I'm sure I'll be much better at this by the time I hit 100K. Probably by the time I
hit 75K who knows uh even by 50,000 and 1. You can be that person click the subscribe button.
So let's talk about choosing a project is. This is important. So choosing a project,
finance and markets are always fun, but I mean the thing you have to realize if you're writing
the neural network to predict the stock market. The first question I'm going to ask you is, if if
you've cracked the stock market with your neural network, why are you recording YouTube videos,
because you're going to be too busy on your yacht. Seriously cool video and audio effects. These are
also awesome. I've used the GANs for this. Just find something that interests you that
you're interested in doing videos about. Your job. That's what got me going okay yeah my primary job
is I work for a large life insurance company. But I started teaching classes for Washington
University as an adjunct, and due to my travel schedule one semester literally I could not be
there to teach the class. So I started recording these videos and putting them up on YouTube.
I don't think I even thought much about subscribers at that point or even knew how many I
had. And just started putting those videos out and all of a sudden I start getting more views than my
students. So if you're in academia, you've got a great avenue to, because you're creating this kind
of content all the time. And what your students are asking you you may not want to put your whole
course on YouTube, that's a bit insane. It's taken a lot of time but that is how that is what got me
started. And then I create videos related to that. Analyzing social media. I don't know I
thought that might be interesting this one I'll talk about applying a larger project. So look at
other projects out there on youtube. Look at Jeff Heaton's GitHub repositories.
Look at some of my more popular projects and maybe you want to do something related to that.
Because if you get, if you do something related to one of my projects, you give me a shout out on
Twitter or something, saying hey look at this awesome video I did relate to some of
your stuff. I'm gonna ping that back and you're going to get some traffic from me as a result.
In fact, if you're particularly interested in that one reach out to me. Uh, I would be glad
to give you an idea for something related to what I've done that you could build on. Because then
that helps make things that I've started and go further with them. And I've got
more ideas than I have time to record. Code from a recent paper just look at the Two Minute Papers,
that is another popular YouTube, massively popular YouTube channel, and find out what
code is related to one of those brand new papers that just came out, and do a video
showing how to actually get the code running. And doing something like that, believe me when
StyleGAN came out if you would have just got a video out there within even the first month,
uh showing how to actually apply some of that code out there in interesting ways. You'll get views
and then cheerlead a Medium or a GitHub repository. So if there's a repo out there
now some YouTuber, one very famous YouTuber, got into a lot of trouble with this. But give proper
credit. It's okay to be a cheerleader and say hey look at these neat things that this other
person did. If you're modifying their code clone the repository so that it links back. Don't copy
their repo and rebrand it as your own. That's just crummy because they put a lot of work into it.
It's great to cheerlead other code and i do that myself because there are people that are a lot
more advanced than me, like NVIDIA, I frequently show their code. Like StyleGAN2 and other things.
So let's talk about some of the major sins of YouTube. Just to kind of close this out and these
are in order this is what annoys people the most, down to the ones that don't seem to annoy people
as much. Use headphones. Always listen to your videos on headphones, high-quality ones. Because
they'll give you the best sound back. And if you put your headphones on and you only hear
one side, you've messed up. Some lavalier mics will literally send just one channel or the other.
That's how I always messed that one up low-quality audio. This is bad so what I am using for this
is a Blue Yeti. This is a great microphone. I'm probably freaking it out now. So that's
why the audio probably sounds weird. Video speed and pauses I mean look at some of the comments
on this video, that I made ages ago. Jumpcut those pauses. Cut them out and go through them.
On background music. I don't know some people like this some people are effective with it.
I have never done it and I consider it mostly a distraction. Maybe transitional music if I wanted
to get a little more creative. Lighting can be good if you're getting into the video. There's
plenty of videos out there talking about how to do lighting. So here you can see the camera is
auto focusing and as I bop around or move a little bit it'll change the focus and just as I'm talking
this is a common problem. I don't think it's one of the most egregious problems that you
can have. But it's a little bit of a distraction. Basically, just by using that screen that I have
sitting right there, I am able to turn off the autofocus once I kind of nail it like I like
it. Then I turn it off and I do that just on the big camera where it's focused on just me.
This camera is it's just a Logitech camera that I have mounted on top of my monitor and I let it
autofocus as it needs because really I use it when the screen is the focus of what I'm doing. Not
me i'm the least important part of this. It's the code and my voice leading you through it.
Thank you for watching this video. On to a hundred thousand. And you can help click the
subscribe button. Click the like button and thank you for watching my videos. I hope they
are useful to you and I'm always interested in hearing your comments both positive and negative.
Let me know what you're interested in seeing further from this channel. Thank you so much!