Channel Update & Future Plans — Full Transcript & Summary

[00:00] I thought I'd give you a little update about this channel, as well as some personal stuff, things happening in my own life, thoughts about CI, how it's affecting everything, including what I'm going to do with this channel.

[00:15] There's no code in this video, so if you're looking for that specifically, feel free to skip this one. You're dismissed. But, where do I start? Because everything in my life is kind of up in the air at the moment, on many different levels.

[00:29] The first thing is that a while back me and my family we bought a house. I think I may have already mentioned that in an earlier video. But it's actually a lot of work. This house was initially a place where the family lived, but that was like in the early 1900s.

[00:45] That's pretty old. But then it was a hotel for a long time. It was a psychiatric ward. It was an office building after that.

[00:57] and when we bought it, it was actually still an office building, so it was actually really complicated getting it to be correctly registered so we could live in the house again and get a mortgage and everything, so rather than that, it was like a huge pain.

[01:12] Then I did like four months of demolition work, removing three layers of ceilings, 100-year-old electricity cables, phone cables, internet infrastructure from 30 years ago.

[01:25] Ah, huge job. And of course, there's a lot that I can't do myself, so we need a contractor. And well, we found out, I really was afraid of that, that renovations like this are extremely expensive.

[01:38] We thought we made a pessimistic budget, but we were living close. Overall, though, it's a huge job, just trying to figure out what things cost, what we can save on, what we can delay or skip altogether.

[01:50] What we need to do really right now to make sure we don't end up with all sorts of construction issues in the future. And of course, at the same time, we have to sell our current house, make sure that some part of the new house is livable for my family while we do all that renovation work.

[02:06] In the end, it's going to be a really cool place, but it's a lot of work. It takes up a lot of my brain space. But fortunately, by the time you watch this video, we will have moved at least.

[02:19] So that's already going to be a huge lift off my shoulder. Now of course, I can't just move once. I mean that would be too easy, right? So in about a month, I'm also going to move with Iron Coast to a new office.

[02:33] So currently, as you can see in the background, I've been here for about half a year. This is an old prison building. I really like the location here. It's right in the center of the track. It's in Netherlands. It's actually really nice.

[02:46] But there's also some issues, right? There's no air code, for example. And I can't open a window here because, well, it's a prison, so you don't want people to leave. So that means in the summer this can get quite uncomfortable, even in the Netherlands.

[03:01] Also from the get-go I knew that this office was going to be a temporary place for me, because, well, they're going to do like a huge renovation here as well, so everybody will need to leave at some point, and then, you know, I have to find some other place to record my videos.

[03:16] But I do really like working in the center of Utrecht. Just, you know, going out, taking a walk through the Dome Tower or recognized places. It's very calming. It helps me keep my mind free.

[03:29] Now, fortunately, I did find a new office. It's also in the center of the draft, which I really like. It's even close to the train station and to the airco, which is also nice. But the office itself is more of like a standard boring office room

[03:44] with like the standard ceilings you see there, etc. So I'm going to have to decorate it a bit. In any case, it means that the background of my videos is going to change again soonish, maybe in a month or two, something like that.

[03:58] So, what's happening with the channel then? Well, to be honest, I've been struggling for a while, trying to get a clear focus on what this channel actually is. I mean, I've covered many topics over the past years, but the recurring themes have always been Python and software design.

[04:15] And that's always been a really good combination for my channel. I think the reason it worked when I created the channel five years ago is that at that time, more and more people were starting to use Python,

[04:28] not just for simple scripts anymore. They were building machine learning pipelines, data analysis systems, APIs, web applications, and so on. And they were looking for content that helped them manage their scattered complexity And one thing in particular that I noticed and that I actually really like about the whole Python community is that a lot of people don come from a classic computer science

[04:50] background. There's people from all sorts of areas and they get into Python, they really like the language and they start developing things and then they're going to learn more. And that's why I think some of the content on my channel has also

[05:03] worked pretty well. But it's also been a great fit for me personally. I mean, I've been teaching programming, software design, for many years at the university, and not just Python, by the way. Actually, I think Python has been a small part of

[05:20] my teaching journey at the university. Mostly I taught C-sharp, C++, Java, these kind of languages. But in the end, the actual programming language you use is not

[05:32] even that important. A second reason that I feel comfortable posting this type of content is that I created lots of different kinds of full applications before. I did that for my research, where I combined graphics engines with scripting systems and all sorts of other things, but I also

[05:50] started a few companies where we developed web-based applications, backends, all sorts of different things, and that all happened before I started this channel. It's just a topic that

[06:02] you know, I like talking about it. It feels very natural to me. Now, of course, I've also done videos covering other topics in the past, like software testing, cloud systems, even some product reviews,

[06:14] like the MacBook or how it's suitable for development. I reviewed a couple of mechanical keyboards, stuff like that. But ultimately, for me, the core of this channel is always going to be software design and Python.

[06:29] In that order, by the way. And interestingly, at the same time, I'm not doing a lot of actual software development anymore myself nowadays, to be totally honest about it.

[06:42] It's not that I never see a line of code anymore, but most of my time coding is actually spent preparing the examples and things for the videos. At Ironcodes we do develop tools that help support our business, like automations, the

[06:56] There's now a web-based portal that we built for businesses to buy course seats in bulk to assign them to employees. It has some cool things like a pretty deep site integration, there's a REST API, a couple

[07:11] of other cool stuff as well. It's a really fun project to work on. I mean, personally, I spent a lot of time in that portal defining the domain, designing the architecture, planning features, what's in the next.

[07:23] I don't write any of the code myself anymore. I have a developer who does that work, and he uses a lot of code a lot nowadays. And that brings me to AI.

[07:35] AI, of course, has been a huge disruptive factor, in particular in software development. I think our field is the field where it has by far the most impact, and that's also very scary. We need to deal with it somehow.

[07:48] We need to adapt and think about what it means for our role as software developers. And not only does it replace a lot of work we did manually in the past, it's also a system that now starts to work on its own,

[08:01] to find and fix bugs, right, to develop completely new features from scratch. It also evolves very quickly. You figure out how to use something, and then a few months or even weeks later, it completely changes again.

[08:14] It's hard to keep up. In fact, I have a constant nagging feeling that I'm way behind on this stuff, right, all the time. At the same time, there's also a weird fundamental mismatch between good software design and generative AI.

[08:30] I think in design there's a lot of value in simplifying and removing things. Throw away a bunch of code. Make things conceptually simpler so that they better fit a particular need.

[08:43] And when you think about it, that's the opposite of what generative AI does. It's why you get these massive pull requests with AI agents, or it's why I wonder sometimes if I read about people running I don't know how many agents to build software while they

[08:57] sleep, I feel that we forget to ask ourselves the question why we need to do all these things. What do we actually accomplish with it? Instead of AI being a meaningful tool for us to help us do better work, it becomes a

[09:13] and we just end up spending all the money on tokens developing more and more software that no one uses But I guess we see what happens But in the meantime I have to decide how all these developments in AI are going to shape my content And when I look at the comment

[09:31] section, I see some conflicting opinions about it by you. Some of you think I should spend more time on software design with AI agents. Things like hard-nosed engineering effectively managing

[09:43] multiple AI coding agents, that sort of thing. Maybe cover some AI agent products, etc. And some of you, on the other hand, are pretty happy that this channel has stayed relatively AI-free,

[09:56] that I'm not turning this into reviewing the latest AI agent system or doing, I don't know, clickbait, fear-mongering videos all the time about how it's all over now with this latest AI model.

[10:09] It feels like a crossroads for the channel. So the question is, where do we go? One thing that's pretty clear to me is that if I want to keep posting videos, it needs to be about things that I care about.

[10:25] And also needs to be about things where I feel I can contribute, where I can help you. I mean, I could start posting videos mostly about AI agent systems, plot code, etc., you name it. But the way I look at it is that these are all tools we can use, just like a mechanical keyboard or a laptop.

[10:44] I've done some videos covering tools like that on the channel, but to be honest, that doesn't really excite me. And it surfaces an overall feeling I have with all these AI tools.

[10:56] I mean, they're really cool and useful and nice, but what I enjoy is software design. I like the thrill of coming up with a really creative solution to a certain problem using

[11:09] concepts and features we have at our disposal in spoken language languages like Python. and the whole ecosystem that's around it. I feel like that's more fundamental than just looking at the tools that we use.

[11:23] And in that sense, AI coding is not that different from old-fashioned coding. We still make a lot of decisions. We have to be involved in the process. We have to think about the designs. It's like if you're an airplane pilot.

[11:37] You need to know the physics of how a plane works. Things like lift, drag, thrust, etc. I'm not a pilot, clearly. But even though you need to know these things,

[11:49] you likely never need to do actual physics computations while you're flying a plane. But you need to know those fundamentals to properly operate it. Because every tool, every machine you use as part of that plane

[12:01] is built on those fundamentals. And in software development, I think it's the same thing. Knowing the fundamentals of design and systems thinking It's one of the most important skills you need as a developer, because all the tools we use are built on top of those fundamentals.

[12:21] And that's also the direction I'm taking the channel in. I don't want to cover the latest AI coding tools or agent systems or whatever. Those are going to be obsolete in a week, a month, something like that.

[12:33] So I want to focus on the fundamentals. Design concepts. Principles. teaching you better ways to design software, how to think like a senior engineer, and share techniques that you can use whether you're writing the code yourself,

[12:48] whether you're letting a team of AI agents write the code for you, or anything that exists in between. I think that's where I can be the most helpful. It's what I really enjoy doing, and mostly it also means this channel stays true to what I think it should stand for.

[13:05] I want to help you write better software. So I present some ideas and concepts and hopefully you critically reflect on them and then maybe you can apply some of these things to grow in your own career. That's what I'm doing it for. I'm not

[13:21] saying I'm going to completely add more AI, of course not. I'm going to talk about it in videos where it makes sense. But I don't want to focus my content on just covering specific tools. I want to focus it on the fundamental thinking you need to

[13:35] develop to become a great software engineer, even if AI takes over most of the actual coding work. Now that choice is going to have some impact on my channel. For one, it

[13:47] will probably mean that it's not gonna grow like crazy because, you know, I'm not doing AI high-top-to-lead videos or surface-level how-to videos that don't to teach you anything meaningful.

[13:59] And personally I okay with that I don really care about the analytics all that much Actually I almost never look at them in the YouTube app Probably the views on my videos may even drop because I made this choice

[14:14] But that's also where I'm going to need a bit of help from you. If you enjoy the deeper kind of videos that I do, and you want me to be able to keep posting them in the future,

[14:27] engage with me. Like the video, share your thoughts in the comments, subscribe to the channel. It's free. And for the survival of a channel like this that's not particularly hype focused, these

[14:40] things are incredibly important. And by the way, it's not just for engagements. I like to hear your thoughts about the topics that I cover. You know, I might not always be able to respond, but I do read all your comments and they help

[14:53] me decide how I should improve the next video that I post. Now, second thing is that I decided that for now I'm going to completely stop with sponsored sections in MagicX.

[15:06] Now, to be clear, I'm not against sponsored sections. I think for many YouTubers they're a good way to present new products to you that you might find interesting. But, of course, you also, as a creator, have to be careful about the types of sponsorships you accept.

[15:22] And for now, I've been extremely picky. I turned down, I don't know, 999 out of 1000 things that land in my inbox. Already I'm not doing lots of sponsored videos on this channel.

[15:34] Maybe until now I aim to do something like once a month. It does provide some extra income, which is a good thing because I'm doing this as a full-time job. But with the channel being more fundamental from now on,

[15:47] I think doing sponsorship doesn't feel like a good fit to me anymore. Also, this takes up quite a bit of my time. If you do sponsorship, you have to deal with grants, payments, reviewing sponsored sections, trying out these tools, figuring out what you want to say about them.

[16:03] And instead of spending the time there, I prefer to spend it on other things. But, of course, there is a practical concern, a little practical concern, that this channel is my full-time job. And I even have an employee who also has this as their full-time job.

[16:19] So it means the channel needs to earn money somehow to pay the bills. support my family and make sure that the company survives. Now, until now the main way I did that is via my online courses. I had several online courses, the software

[16:33] designer mindset, the software architect mindset, I did a couple of smaller courses along the path. But also in that area I'm making a pretty big change. I've been working over the past year on a completely new program that is also more

[16:49] fundamental takes into account how AI affects our work that's a natural extension of the content that I post here on YouTube it's called software design masters and from now on that's the only course I'm going to offer it

[17:04] basically replaces everything that I had in the past it's a completely new program that takes you through the core design fundamentals through system design to the trade-offs you need to make as a designer. This not only follows your personal

[17:22] transformation to a more senior engineer, but it also focuses way more on the fundamentals and developing a way of thinking of systems, thinking of thinking like a senior designer.

[17:34] And to me that's the most important shift. I also get a certificate after each of the main part of the program, there's a community, there's lots of extra content to dive into, and I'm going to add more and more content to that whole library, there's live sessions

[17:49] where I will do design exercises together, there's lots and lots of things already in that program. If you enjoy the videos on YouTube, the software that you're on Mars 3 goes even deeper. It's available now, check it out, at primerscope.com. Anyway, this was sort

[18:05] of a personal video for me to make. I hope you don't mind me doing this one time at a time. I think it's good that I also share these things with you. You know that way you see that I'm also just a normal person trying to figure things out, navigate this crazy time we're living in right now. But

[18:22] mostly though I hope you're doing okay to not get into the distracted by all the noise. But let me know in the comments how can my channel help you the most in the future. Or perhaps you just have

[18:35] some suggestion for some crazy pattern or principle that I should cover in an upcoming video. Feel free to share that as well. If YouTube thinks you might like this video next, thanks for watching and see you next time.