EmacsConf 2024 Talk: So You Want To Be An Emacs-Fluencer?

hey I'm goar and today I'm going to talk about being an emac influencer and try to convince you to be one too hopefully that goes well if not we'll see you at the end of the talk but first I want to share something and that is that knowledge grows when it is shared this is usually how I end my videos some of you may be familiar with this and I say this quote because I believe there is truth to it the more you share something the more you reinforce it and the more the knowledge grows not just for you but for everybody else around it with who you share it with so with that being said there's only one question I want to ask you and that is when's the last time you shared something now the sharing of knowledge doesn't just have to be about emx it can just be about other things that you learn in life there's plenty of things that I share with people that I've learned in life and I hope that they learn from what I'm saying as well you know uh learn from the mistakes and others type of deal things like that but anyway since this is emex comp we're going to keep it to related so we're going to find ways on how to share all that emex knowledge that is locked up inside your guys's brain so sharing emex how can we do that well there's a few ways we can do meetups and conferences AKA emex comp like we're doing now so hopefully one of you guys might be incentivized to share the knowledge that you have in the next upcoming year or the future ones or be a repeated presenter you know the list goes on and on and blog post so one of the easier entries to Bear because it is uh right writing and you don't have to do video you know not like the other formats that I'm about to present and tweeting is also an easier format as well cuz it's even smaller than the blog post more condensed and you can use hashtags uh when I was learning the or when I was reading the or mod manual I would use the hashtag or tip on on Twitter and so if you even if you search right now I believe you'll find some of my tweets but yeah that's one way that you can go that you can go about it simple tweets that you find Little Things little nuggets of gold as I would say of course there's podcasts which I'm pretty sure the emex community would love to have so if anybody wants to pick up a podcast go right ahead also twitch live streaming which is Twitch is a platform in which you can do live streaming for those who are not familiar and people I seen people use the emex tag in there and you know just pop up say hello ask questions things like that you can be working on the configuration or just reading emex source code you know that fun stuff like that and videos which is what I do which which I will touch in in a second and there's probably more formats that I'm not thinking of at the moment and that you guys can probably fill in the gaps but yeah these are just some of the ways that we can share emac so how do we get started well before we get started I want to talk about my credentials right I mean who is this guy that you just listening in this little square talking about creating videos well I run a channel called go pism on YouTube has around 2,700 subscribers at the moment I kind of know a little bit of the flow I'm not an expert but you know I've done enough videos that I kind of understand uh the flow of all of at least the simple way of doing it which I want to share so right now you're probably thinking okay I get that you want to sell us on the whole video making formats or you know sharing just emex in general but I'm a beginner I'm an intermediate I'm an advanced you know I don't know if I can provide input and each of those I want to tackle each of those and say that yeah each of you have input you know for a beginner you might be say oh an intermediate an advanced person already has information intermediate might say oh I'm not at that level yet and advanced person might say oh I have nothing to say you know I don't I don't every what I know everybody else know so I want to you know dispel that and tell you that hey it doesn't matter so for beginners you guys are in a beautiful place which is that you're you have a clean slate so the way I imagine is that every emx user is presented upon themselves you know kind of like this world and in this world you can either build a road that can goes to the mountains the city or to the beach and some of us have decided which way we want to go you know some of us might be building the road to the city to the beach um for example if someone starts a road to the city they are probably stuck in their ways right on what leads them to the goal to the city they're not going to make a detour towards the mountain or towards the beach uh to get to the city they just want the straightest path and when you are used to doing things certain way you're kind of have tunnel vision so as a beginner you don't have any of that because you're just starting brand new everything is you know a world of possibilities so I would say that this is a very big Advantage the second one is that people enjoy the journey right people want to see someone grow from like this spot to the next level etc etc this is one of the reasons why we watch movies TV shows anime right because there's a character that needs a problem and they're working their way up to solve that problem if we just get to see the ending of where they saw the problem we don't really feel anything cuz we weren't part of that Journey so I would say that that starting from scratch is a pretty good place to be and of course if you're going to be writing or making videos or anything related to emex you kind of have to force if if you want to teach people you kind of have to learn it so you're kind of forced to learn which is always encouraged for intermediates now you might be saying hey I'm I'm a little past intermediate I'm I'm sorry past but I don't feel confident enough to share well I'd say that you're wrong once you're intermediate you're probably filling with your with your emex config you know maybe doing something with org mode like a lot of people are doing it and you can document talk about the things that you do and also those um those functions that you write an eist to just improve quality of life things like that and there's a whole list of things that you can do these are just you know two things out of a plethora of items that you can talk about and for my Advanced folks you guys are in a position where you guys know more about the emac internals you might have read the source code you might know a emac manual section pretty well that you can talk about and usually when you're at the advanced or intermediate level you start or at least some people start writing packages so you can talk about the best practices for creating packages um the troubles that you face you know things that you learn things like that now that I given a little bit of examples for each of these tiers there's probably still something going on in each of you guys' mind which is which is something all of us get to face and that is impostor syndrome now with impostor syndrome the sad reality is that we all have it at some point we're going to you know at the beginner intermediate or even Advan stage it doesn't matter there's always that little voice imposter syndrome saying hey uh you're probably not good enough or not sad but questioning if you're good enough or if you deserve to be at this level and things like that I believe it's very common with software engineers and the other sad thing is that it will never go away but I the way I see it with impostor syndrome is that we embrace it if we are getting impostor syndrome is because we're pushing oursel to a Next Level that we haven't been able to to overcome or to progress in so if you're pushing yourself you will get impostor syndrome like oh hey am I good enough to lead this project to finish this to you know optimize this part or whatever I feel it's a good way imposter syndrome yeah it feels horrible but I believe that if you have it it's because you're doing something right okay now that we've got that out of the way what's the process for recording well it's actually a lot simpler than you think there's three steps and one of them you might not even have to do depending on how you want to go about it so the first one is that you have to record your voice and screen because if you do want to make video people have to see what you're doing and they have to hear what you're talking otherwise it's going to be not as engaging and of course you can make the face optional when recording videos if you watch some of my videos sometimes I show my face sometimes I don't it just really depends on the mood of what I'm doing doing uh when I'm recording the video but yeah uh completely up to you and after recording you can edit if desired uh I remember when I first started making the videos I wouldn't I was not editing them at all I was just one shot and upload so that can either be good or bad depending on your you know depending on how you view it but it is what it is uh nowadays I do some light editing mainly just to remove the silences or when I'm um going through debugging something third one is to upload it which is might be the easiest section depending on your goals so at minimum you would put title description and a little bit more and you'll get Ys to YC it can be as easy or as complicated as you want um which I'll go over later at the end so let's go over details for recording so for recording thankfully all os's or at least the major OSS have free recording software or you can go a little fancy and get paid which usually you know depending on your Viewpoint might make things easier or not personally I use I'm a Mac so I use the built-in screen recording which if you do command shift 5 it will pop up a little dialogue and if you did it just now you can press the Escape key to get rid of it and life goes on but yeah also for all major 3's OBS is a pretty popular choice not just for streaming but for recording as well so that's something you might want to look at if you do if you do decide to do this um a record videos but all up to you these are just you know things that I've come along or encountered along the way when it comes to recording I do have some tips that might help you out at least if I could go back in time this is what I would tell myself and that is that audio quality matter matters so if possible get an external mic that is not always you know feasible because extra mic costs money and when you're starting out with YouTube you are not going to make a penny um that YouTube has very high um restrictions or I guess um bars that you need to pass before you start getting any revenue for example my channel I still haven't met those bars so I still not Genera any re any Revenue so anything that I buy is just out of pocket since I work from home I already had a mic and things like that set up so I just use that for recording videos but if you have you can use the built-in mic uh in your laptop if you have one but I would strongly suggest if you do that try to minimize the noise you know go into a quiet room make sure there's no like washing machine or anything going off right now cuz people do not they can handle you know not the greatest quality of video but when it comes to audio picky people are a lot more pickier when it comes to that next is don't start with recording the face voice and Screen are just fine I feel personally I feel when I record when I started recording my face it made it harder in a sense um because now I was just not only concentrated on what I was showing how I was sounding but how I look if I was making any faces like that so it's just one less thing to have on your brain when you're recording another thing is that when I started recording I was very passionate or excited about doing this so what I would do is I took that to the advantage is that I just recorded a lot of videos in one go or a in sessions so as soon as I recorded start the next one next one Etc and I strongly believe that helped because later down the road once I got got busy with work or life or whatever I didn't really have to worry about making time I already had a batch ready to go that I can just slow pull out and edit and upload so that's something helpful um whenever you know work is slow or your Vacations or things like that you want to record just you know go for it another one is when you are editing you can use pauses so that it's easier to edit because what happens to at least this what happened to me when I was beginning is that I would say oh I can Mumble fumble you know do a lot of burbo fillers and I can just edit it but if you don't do any pauses it's kind of hard to fix or to fix the mistakes uh the things that you don't want people seeing cuz then it doesn't it doesn't blend well if you do editing and if you do any editing you know what I'm talking about because then you know there's like chops of audio from the previous clip or trying to edit yeah there's ways to mitigate that but my editing skills are very minimal it's just what I need to know to get things done um so just using pauses helps out a lot and another thing is that some people want to record in like super high quality you know get the highest quality possible for the video I would say instead of focusing on the video recording focus on the audio like I mentioned because at the end of the day we're in emex and we're only sharing text so you know there's only so much definition that you can show on text if and if anything just increase the font simple as that and my personal favorite or at least the one that I still encounter even now is that when I'm recording my voice still feels dry um you know right when I'm about to record all of a sudden I get dry I need to drink water it's like it feels uncomfortable I get nervous because it's something new I'm staring at myself it's like oh man all the like I mentioned just extra things that I need to worry about but all of this goes less with practice you know the more you do it the more comfortable you are you know it's just like everything else when you start learning guitar your fingers are very hard when you start learning piano you know the the independence of fingers don't want to work when you're learning drums each limb needs to be independent it's very hard you have to start very slow so everything in life you know practice and it will get better all right now editing well like I mentioned this is not always going to be necessary depending in your style there's some YouTube uh emex uh creators that simply record everything in one go you know they might get up get a coffee or something and they'll just leave that in the clip which is totally fine no shame it's the way they they want to do the video or sometimes they just you know don't have any time to edit the videos themselves or pay someone else to do it so what's the best in the thing just leave it as is upload it's like it's that's fine that completely works I will say that if you do end up editing or deciding to edit and you want a software I would say check out the Vinci resolve it's free it's available on the three major os's and honestly the Vinci by resolve by itself has a plethora of features that I I personally I only use like five or 5% Max on the features um so and it's professional it's a like professional studio all the way things like that um but yeah I would say the Vinci resolve is pretty solid Choice okay what about the tips for editing well most of them are pretty straightforward you know just learn enough to get going like in all things you know like if you have a band practice and you're rehearsing a a song you just need to know the chords you don't need to know improvise just enough to get you through this gig that you're playing that's pretty much it and of course learn the keyboard shortcuts we all come from emac so we all know how valuable how much we treasure shortcuts to avoid the mouse unfortunately since you're editing you will have to use the mouse but the more keyboard shortcuts use uh the less the mouse is used so there's that and one thing is that I didn't know you can actually do this until I started editing is that you can uh play the the speed of the video in 2X and for me this is great because since I'm mainly just listening for pauses in my video I just wait until they're silence so it's like oh that's the part I need to trim or that's the part I need to remove simple as that and also batch edit the same thing as I said about recording uh recording videos just do it in batch you can also just batch edit as well okay uploading the final step so YouTube If you do end up using YouTube which is the most popular choice for uploading videos is that the up the uploading process is pretty straightforward I imagine this is the same for every other platform that you choose but it's pretty straightforward but it can be a little complic be a little complicated depending on what you want to do so what are my tips for uploading well first of all at minimum you need to have a descriptive title and a description of what you talk about in the video just to help out with SEO and things like that when people are searching for emac on YouTube also if possible use a thumbnail um so there's a whole Community about emex creators discussing best practices to get the highest engagement you know get people watching your videos things like that and they one of the things is they highly recommend a thumbnail and if you mainly watch or if you watch any emix content a lot of us do not use thumbnails and that's perfectly fine I think the emix community is pretty used to just watching videos with you know just a thumbnail is just a screenshot of the video and we just go there for the content right we're not really going there for anything else for the knowledge that the person is spreading and I say that it can be as simple as complex because if your goal is to potentially earn Revenue down the line you will want to spend some time configuring some of the settings for uploading like the tags the uh I forget what they're called but they're little embedded so that people can watch other videos and things like that so there's a plethora of options an abundance of options honestly there's there's too many but it all depends if you potentially want to make some type of income in the future with emex making videos on emex and yeah that's just something that you will have to discover and read and learn more about with the emex community emix Creator Community uh suggest and best practi things and things like that but if anybody ever wants to talk about it feel free to reach out to me I would love to you know talk about things um on all you know about YouTube and all this because I find it interesting so potentially hopefully one day I will be able to make some some Revenue but hopeful maybe some of you guys might get knock it out of the park with what I'm going to talk about next and that is your secret sauce so this is your Ultimate Weapon as to get viewers to get subscribers you know to get anybody that wants to watch your you know to reach a higher audience and that can be your humor you might be naturally funny you know you can make comments you know you have a natural scale on on the way you talk on the way you articulate things so you might be able to get people drawn to that or you might be someone who just do does animations for your videos which does highly well as well so all or you can do a mix of all these you know you can just insert your superpower whatever you want you can go ahead and use that to your advantage to grow a user base a buer base and hopefully you know if all things align you'll be able to get get paid to also create emac uh videos so you to spread the knowledge which would be pretty cool become an emac influencer which is the goal right okay so I believe I painted this in a pretty good light at least personal opinion but like everything every good also has a bad nothing is always perfect so that's also the same for YouTube so what are the bads of YouTube well it's not going to be an overnight success that is very very rare you're not going to create a video and then all of a sudden get like 100,000 views I Believe by uh from what I've seen in the community if a video gets over 10K K that it means that it did really well in the emac community um I think on average is under 3K um for a video within uh this is uh within a time span of I'd say like two weeks or so or a month around there so it varies so all these metrics you'll learn if you really actually want to be able to create something in the emac but like I said it does take work and it does take time another thing is that negative feedback people are very quick as we all have been accustomed to that people are do not shy from being very negative it is so easy to just say negative and mean things online because there's no repercussions I don't understand why people do that but it is what it is but most of these comments are from the younger uh population and you know just ignore them most of the time they're just ignorant they don't know what they're saying it it will help you get them you know grow some thick skin thick skin if you already have thick skin that you don't you know this is not going to be a problem but most of the negative comments that I've received are are childish I would say that it's not really based on anything that has substance so yeah just ignore it it's fine you know it's not going to affect your day you know don't let it affect your day is the most important thing and third like I was mentioned revenue is very hard to get monetized on by YouTube standards so that will definitely take some time and dedication but if you really want it you will work for it um you know hopefully all of us the people that are constantly creating content uh via these platforms are able to get compensated in some way or another because we do share it because we love it but also it would be nice to get some compensation I'm not speaking for everybody I'm speaking personally um because time is a valuable asset and depending and you know you can choose where you want to spend it and right now I'm having fun making videos so that's where I'm deciding to spend it uh but yeah now with all this that I've said there's only one question that I want to ask for all of youall and that is what are you going to share

The Talk I gave at EmacsConf2024: ======================================== Ever thought about sharing your Emacs knowledge? Starting a YouTube channel, blog, podcast, or even smoke signals to share those tidbits? If you’ve answered "No", then I'd like to change your mind. And if you said "Yes", then you're already on the right path. In this talk, I will share what I've learned from my journey as an Emacs advocate, including tips, setups (both current and past), and various alternatives to get your works out there. Most importantly, I'll discuss why your story and perspective matter, even if you think otherwise. Your unique experience can inspire and help others in the Emacs community. About the speaker: Gopar, a fellow Emacs user and advocate, will be sharing insights on how everyone can become the Emacs Influencer they never knew they wanted to be. From starting a YouTube channel to writing blogs, Gopar will provide practical tips and share personal experiences to help you embark on your journey of sharing Emacs knowledge. 00:00 Introduction 00:12 Knowledge grows when it is shared 00:36 When's the last time you shared something? 01:07 Sharing Emacs 02:41 My background 03:06 Why you should make Emacs videos (or other formats) 03:44 Beginners 05:22 Intermediate 05:56 Advanced 06:22 Impostor syndrome 07:28 Process for recording 08:46 Details: recording 09:36 Tips: Recording 13:33 Details: Editing 14:38 Tips: Editing 15:44 Details: Uploading 16:06 Tips: Uploading 18:06 Your secret sauce 19:04 Cons of YouTube ----------------------------------------------------- Github: https://github.com/gopar/ ----------------------------------------------------- John 3:16 - "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." James 1:5 - "If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you." I thank God for all the wisdom he has blessed me with.