I love screen-casts as a medium for communicating technical information. Why?

  • They often reveal the character of the software engineer
  • They tend to move briskly enough that we often get to see real engineers thinking through real problems, elucidating their reasoning, making mistakes and fixing them.
  • They typically offer a shorter attention interval than text posts covering the same material.
  • They engage both visual and audio learning channels.

I remember, years ago, staying up until the wee hours of the morning following along with a screencast building a clojurescript client for real-time control of a clojure overtone synthesizer server.

I’m also a big fan of Bret Victor’s essays about exploring the future medium for thought. Moreover, I love his supporting documentation he publishes with his talks that give his public speaking persistence, depth, context and a life on the internet beyond a vimeo recording of him pacing and speaking on a mic. If you haven’t seen these then go grab some popcorn, because it’s movie night!

Media for Thinking the Unthinkable - visual+text - notes

Drawing Dynamic Visualizations - visual+text

The HumaneRepresentation Of Thought - notes

The Future of Programming - notes

Non-video content built around screencasts offers some enhancement to the screen-cast:

  • A set of static instructions can be searched for keywords, copied, and pasted
  • The organizational structure of static text and images is transparent and can be interpreted quickly by skimming titles and headings.
  • Static text and image is persistent, and can be easily updated over time, where video content might need to be re-recorded; a huge pain).
  • Code snippets in a blog post can reduce complexity, by focusing only on specific files, classes, methods or lines of code, and ignoring the rest of the text on screen.
  • Static text and images can be reviewed at the pace of the reader, where as screen-casts move at the pace of the producer.
  • Text content can go into more depth on subjects of interest that may be passed over in screen-cast.

I think the real magic of any future medium for improving thinking, is finding the best combinations of our current tools; combinations that leverage the strengths of different current mediums, and enhance the communication of information without any penalty.

So here’s my humble attempt to explore a mixed screen-cast and text medium, focusing specifically on technical blogging.

I’ll be using this blog to release technical blog posts built around technical screen-casts.

Here’s the first one: Getting Started With Nodal

The screen-cast is embedded, central and but toggleable. The blog post follows the content of the screencast closely, while adding notes, references, structure, code snippets, and details that become relevant upon consuming the screencast.

Nothing about this is absolutely novel.

The open question is whether it’s useful. Enjoy!