Hey folks, this is a channel update video, so if you're not interested in that, feel free to click away and hopefully come back for some future video that hopefully you'll find that more interesting. First off, I need to let the channel members know that YouTube is mad at me for some reason and has disabled my channel memberships. Not sure what's going on. YouTube says my AdSense account is suspended, but my AdSense dashboard says everything is fine. The result of that though is I can't make videos just for members anymore to let you folks know what's going on. Also, please forgive me if this video is a little rougher than normal. I fast-tracked as soon as I found out I couldn't let my members know that my access to memberships have been suspended. I'm not asking for help to fix it, I'm not asking for sympathy, it'll probably get fixed eventually, but it's not at the end of the world. My total earnings from YouTube for all of 2025 was less than 6 grand, so I'm definitely not making videos for the money. And to be honest, I'm not a good fit for the whole advertising ecosystem anyway. Google is an Advertising Technology and an AI company, and the more I push back on AI hype and the more I talk about the problems with AdTech, the more likely I am to get kicked out of the rewards program anyway, which might have actually been what caused this, but right now I haven't a clue. I do hope that I don't get completely kicked off the platform though. There aren't very many of us that are trying to make content that tries to be realistic about the pros and cons of AI and big tech right now. Most everybody is either 100% all-in hype or 100% "this stuff is useless". Just in case though, I've created a free Patreon link below, and I have a free newsletter I've had for a while that you can subscribe to the link below for that, So I'll have some way of trying to get my message out in the event that YouTube gets even more mad at me. Full disclosure though, I haven't published anything to the newsletter in a few months, although with how YouTube is acting up right now that certainly bumps that up in priority. I don't really want to be an ad-fueled creator anyway though. I don't like the impact that Advertising Technology is having on society, and I don't really want to contribute to that problem.

It's a rough time to be a developer right now, although it's still not as bad as the dot-com crash, and I expect that when the AI bubble pops, it's going to get a lot worse for a while before it gets better. I really want to try to help with that. I've been talking for a year or so now about creating a class for developers to figure out how to start their own business. Believe it or not, I actually really have been working on that. I got sidetracked into a dead end rip-off and lost quite a bit of time, made a video on that one, but I have been working on it, and I even have an outline of it ready, and I would love to get your feedback about it. Let me first tell you what the class is not, so those of you that aren't interested can not waste any more of your time. The first, let me start with a quick, free piece of advice that far too few people understand. When you're building things, it's vitally important to first solve the smallest version of the problem that you can, get that out in the world and running, and then build upon that success. Biting off any more than the minimum that you can greatly reduces your chance of succeeding. This is true for building a software product, and it's also true for building a software curriculum, so I'm starting with a specific audience, and then, once I get that working, I'm going to expand on that, which means that some of you unfortunately won't be in the first audience, and I'm sorry about that.

So first off, this class isn't going to teach programming itself. If you're not already comfortable programming, this isn't going to help you, and this isn't going to be a programming with AI class either, although I'll talk about AI at some level. More about that later in the video. Secondly, this class is, at least to start with, not for early career people that haven't spent a couple of years at least working in the industry already. If you just got out of school or you're just out of a bootcamp or something and you're looking for a job, unfortunately, this isn't for you. That said, once I get this class running and I feel like it's been useful to people, then I intend to make an extended version of that class that's intended for early career people. But right now, if I try to make a class both about being an independent software creator and a class about entering the programming workforce at the same time, I wouldn't do a good job of either. Once I'm confident I figured out what the later career folks need, then I can add the other stuff on top of that, but trying to do all of that at once is a recipe for failure. So next, I can only teach what I know, which means I can only teach in English, and I don't know any other languages well enough to teach in them. I can only talk about business issues from inside the United States because that's where I am. I'm not going to stop you from taking the class if you're outside the U.S., but I'm not going to be able to help you with the way that things work outside the U.S. I haven't worked in the video game industry, so I can't help with that. I'm not a lawyer, an accountant, or a financial advisor. I can't give you legal or financial advice. I can and will tell you what I have done and what has worked for me and what hasn't worked for me. And I'll recommend books from experts outside my field for things like legal issues. If you choose to take advice from those books, then that's up to you. Next, I want to be clear that this isn't a get-rich-quick thing. Being on your own is not the easiest path. I've done it on and off for 20 years or so. There are times I like it. There are times I don't want to deal with it, and I just take a normal job, and there are times that I don't want to do my own thing at all, but I have to because I just don't have the option of being an employee for one reason or other. I will tell you that building and running your own product will absolutely make you a better programmer, and it will give you an opportunity to learn skills that are hard to acquire otherwise. I will also tell you that once you've learned how to build your own business, you can always do that again if you need to later in your career, so it's a great tool to have in your toolbox. But if you're looking for an easy way to make money, this isn't it.

Next I want you to know that, at least during the lectures, I'm going to try to focus on higher level, more evergreen content rather than getting in the weeds of what's going on in the current moment. For example, I'll be talking about AI off and on, but I'll primarily be talking about AI in the context of how to evaluate and use programming productivity tools, whether they're AI or other things. The goal here is to teach you how to navigate the industry as technology changes, not teach you exactly how to use claude code versus 4.5 or whatever. That way next month when the new Gemini or the new chatGPT or the new thing past LLMs comes out, and it's way better than what we've got now, what you learn in class won't be outdated immediately. I'll talk about how I'm using AI, of course, if people want, and I'll answer whatever questions people have to the best of my ability. Sometimes that might mean I have to go off and do some research and come back to you. If so, I will. Even if those questions are down in the weeds, but I'm going to try to answer as many of the questions as I can in as widely an applicable manner as I can and as an evergreen content as I can. So hopefully this is a class that will teach you things that will serve you for the rest of your career, not just for the next year or two. That's the hope at least. Lastly, this first class is only for folks that are actively planning on working on a project kind of as we go. I don't need you to be working on it full-time, I don't expect you to be done by the time the class is over, but I need feedback on the class as I teach it. So if you only want to take the class passively and not try to apply any of it during the weeks that the class is being taught, I'd ask that you wait to take the class until after I've gotten and incorporated the feedback from the first set of people taking it.

Okay, so let's talk about the class structure. My current plan is for a six to eight, maybe a little more week class. I'm planning on six, but I'm expecting that as I get feedback from people in the classes I go, I'll end up realizing that there are things that I assumed most people would know, but that need to be part of the class. And I expect I'll adjust the curriculum as we go. It might be things I need to go deeper in, we'll just see. That might stretch the class out to eight weeks or maybe even more. I'm planning on two mostly identical hour-ish long class sessions each week at two different times, probably one during the workday and one on the weekend or on an evening. Students can attend either session or both, and the classes will all be recorded, they will be made available to all the people taking the class. So you can refer back to what happened in the class after it's over, or you can watch another session of the class, or you can catch up in the event that something prevented you from attending class that week. I'm also planning on having two sessions of office hours or open Q&A each week. They'll be scheduled beforehand, again, probably one during business hours and one on an evening or a weekend. They'll be free form. I'll do my best to answer whatever questions anyone has, whether they're directly related to the curriculum or not. Again, they'll be recorded for any student to watch that once too. There's going to be a community chat forum service thing where folks can talk amongst each other and ask me questions. It won't be discord. I don't like discord. It'll be a dedicated online learning platform. I'm kind of leaning towards Circle.SO at the moment, but that hasn't been finalized yet. The community will continue after the class is complete, and I plan on continuing to hold office hours in Q&A after the classes themselves are all done, at least for as long as people are still showing up to the Q&A's with questions. There will be a single up front charge for the class, which also grants access to the online community. There will be a process where, as you don't think the class is worth it, you can get your money refunded, except for whatever financial transaction fees were extracted by the payment network company. I want this to be useful to people, and I don't want you to feel like you're being ripped off. And if you're not getting anything out of it, I don't want you to feel like I took your money for something that you don't want. I don't know what the cost is going to be. That will be set after I've had a chance to talk with some of you - more on that in a minute. But I'll put the cost out before the class starts so everybody will know what they're signing up for.

Okay. So let's talk about what's in the class. Note that this is a draft in a subject to reordering additions, et cetera, although everything in these sessions will be in the class, the grouping might be rearranged, or it might change. I might get other topics added. It's possible, especially after people ask questions, that some of these topics might get expanded beyond the length of the session for that week, in which case things will need to get rearranged, potentially with the addition of another week of sessions to the schedule. Session one is about career planning, riding the waves of technology changes, how to decide when it's better time to be an employee or a consultant or a small software service provider, and why. How to survive as technology changes, how to decide what kind of business is a good fit for you, how to pick an idea and decide what you want to build, at least what you want to build first. Session two is on specifying and deciding on a minimum viable product, how to think about subscriptions, free versions, paid versions, tiers, upselling, all that kind of stuff. And three is about getting an MVP up and running, so picking programming languages, framework, security, continuous integration, continuous delivery, cloud providers, user databases, encryption, front end, back end, databases, batch processing, compute server, controlling costs, all that kind of stuff. Session four is about necessary customer-facing collateral, so domain names, marketing, websites, gauging interest, social media, A/B testing, finding your audience, customer service, all that kind of stuff. And five is about business and behind-the-scenes work, so finances, basic accounting, basic taxes, basic corporate structures, window-engaged professionals like lawyers' accountants, that kind of thing. And then session six is about expanding and scaling tech stuff, automating testing, logging, debugging troubleshooting, building for maintainability, monitoring, failing gracefully, adding new features, pivoting product direction as things change, that kind of stuff. Note that not everything you might possibly want to know about these topics can be covered in the time allotted, this isn't a coding bootcamp. In class, I'm going to be covering the lessons I learned the hard way, the things that fit in the gaps between the other resources. For things that are more straightforward, I'll be recommending other resources, books, videos, that kind of thing. So for example, when I talk about data storage in class, I'll talk about the pros and cons of SQL databases, object databases, direct serialization, file storage retrieval, object relational mappers, caching, et cetera. And I'll answer any questions folks have, but instead of trying to teach SQL itself, I'm going to point you at a Joe Celko book, I'll probably talk about pros and cons of programming in Go, Rust, Python, TypeScript, et cetera, but when it comes to questions about how to use those particular languages, then I'll expect you to make use of books and tutorials and stuff outside of class. I'll answer questions if you have them, but I'm not going to do tutorials on every single language. And I expect that pretty much everybody is going to have their own unique little version of the combination of frameworks and languages and cloud hosts and all that kind of stuff.

Okay. So if that doesn't sound like something you're interested in, thanks for watching this far. But if it does sound like something you'd be interested in, I'd like to hear from you because I'm only assuming this is a class that people would find valuable and that creating and teaching it would be worth the effort. And before I commit to the time, it's going to take to do it, I need to find out if that assumption is correct. So if this is the kind of class you'd potentially be interested in, I would appreciate it if you'd go to this link on the screen or down below, fill out a form, let me know what you think about the description I just gave you. The things I want to know the most are how much do you think such a class would be worth to you? is there anything you think that you'd want to learn such a class that's missing from what I described in the video? Is there anything I described as being in the class that you think doesn't belong? Is there anything in the description that's unclear or there are other questions or feedback that you have? At the end of the survey, if you have other feedback, there will place where you can type stuff in, and if you wish, you can even schedule a free Zoom call with me to discuss it further. So thanks for watching this far. I hope to hear from you. Let's be careful out there. Take care.