Making of CodelyTV Pro 🚀

Today marks 5 months since CodelyTV Pro was born, the platform of programming courses that we launched from CodelyTV. In this post, we will share how we've experienced these first months, what we've done, and some progress 😬😬😬

Proto-launch 🤔

July 3, 2017. After thinking it over a lot and despite being super comfortable working at letgo, I left and started full-time to bring CodelyTV Pro to life. We had been running the CodelyTV channel as a hobby for 2 years, and I felt it was time to try something serious with it. I didn’t want to be left wondering "what if we had tried." I wanted to dedicate love to the content and offer it as courses. In addition, it was necessary to collaborate with more people in the field to cover other technical areas besides the backend. We wanted to be a subscription platform where you could find quality content for continuous training, and building that required time. I spent the first 3 months going to PromoFarma one day a week as a consultant/trainer. They were starting to rethink their system and wanted to lay the foundations for what is the new HTTP API. So I encouraged myself to lend them a hand, and this way, I could have time to prepare CodelyTV Pro.

Pre-launch: Measuring interest with pre-sales 👨‍🔬

We prepared a video explaining what we were going to do, a static landing page with a link to buy the "product" on PayPal, and we announced it on Twitter on August 2 to measure interest in what we were setting up. Fortunately, people like José from SmokingBrains and Nico from Uvinum advised us to include the purchase with some pre-sale offer directly on the landing page. We would have just gone ahead with the subscription box for the newsletter, thus losing quite a few people who bought the promotion. We probably should have done the opposite: measure interest before even preparing anything, but luckily it worked out well and gave us strength 😬. Against all odds (especially announcing it in August 🤦‍♂️), the announcement received over 80 retweets, 100 likes, and many people jumped at the chance to buy the pre-sale offer (€30 for the first 3 months). Rafa's phone battery died three times from all the notifications 😂. Here’s a moment on Twitter collecting some of the Tweets.

Launch: Publishing the first courses 🚀

Course Preparation

September 20 was the big day, and everything had to be ready. This involved considerable work since it was also the first time we were recording courses, and we had the self-imposed pressure of not being able to fail. Many people had bravely agreed to expose themselves and share their experiences (hats off to them🎩) and we couldn't waste the opportunity for it to be recorded in a format that matched the quality of the content. In two and a half months, we had prepared the first 6 courses:

• Agile: Retrospectives: We want to start publishing complementary courses that aren't purely technical. José from SmokingBrains has ample experience with Agile, and team management was certainly something that could interest the CodelyTV audience. Since they are good people, he didn’t think twice and jumped in 🙂.

  

• AWS: Your first deploy on EC2: For system administration topics, we wanted to start from the ground up. We aimed at that profile of developer who wants to prepare for a more DevOps environment. José Armesto is a phenomenon in these topics and also has teaching experience in the High-Performance Web Programming Master at La Salle, so there was no doubt it was a perfect fit.

  

• CQRS: Command Query Responsibility Segregation: We primarily did this course because we wanted to. We know that there isn’t a large volume of people who might be interested. The thing is, having gone through a tough learning curve on how to implement these types of concepts, we felt the need to condense that learning and share it. In the end, it turned out that a lot more people signed up than we expected. We assume that’s due to the audience bias we had been building around the public CodelyTV channel, so… 🎉🙂
• Introduction to Scala: We believe that functional programming "has arrived" to stay. The problem we at least faced back then was the entry curve (something we discussed in the interview with Raúl Raja). Thus, we wanted to share that learning in the smoothest possible way. First, by establishing knowledge about the particularities of the language and ecosystem, and then getting to the point with other courses.

  

• UI Testing on Android with Espresso and UI Testing on iOS with KIF: Talking with Pedro, I mentioned what we were setting up, and the opportunity to collaborate with Karumi arose to create some mobile courses. Jorge and Sergio came to Barcelona and produced 4 amazing courses in 2 days. It was material they had already worked on for workshops, and I personally loved recording them. Coming from the backend world, I learned a lot by seeing the state of the art in mobile testing.

  

Managing Discounts

For the launch, one of the things we had to manage was sending the discount codes that people had purchased. The way we did this caused a bit of confusion since we did not make it clear enough that the only thing you were buying at that moment was this fictitious PayPal product as a discount, and you were not registering on the platform. It is only after making the PayPal purchase, in a semi-manual process, that we send each user their discount code that they can use to actually register on the platform. Basically, we prepared an Excel sheet with all the PayPal purchases and the associated discount code, imported it as a Merge Tag into MailChimp, and voilà. To this day, we follow a similar process when someone purchases a discount like the €5 for the course launch. It’s something that can be automated, but we are taking it step by step :P

Second Season: Expanding the Catalog 👌

On December 11, we launched the second round of CodelyTV courses with a super production trailer:

For this second season, we prepared the following courses:

• HTTP API with Scala and Akka: Once we had established the foundations of Scala at the language and ecosystem level, it was time to create the first practical course with Scala. We wanted to build an application that would be useful to people, applying object-oriented principles (OO). We decided to go with an HTTP API, applying SOLID patterns and Hexagonal Architecture. This way, we solidified knowledge in terms of language, libraries, and ecosystem from a practical approach. However, we did this with familiar techniques for developers accustomed to OO so that it wouldn’t be too abrupt of a jump.
• App with VueJS and Jest applying TDD: Our first frontend course. Here we were clear that we didn't want to produce the umpteenth "how to start with VueJS" tutorial. So Alberto and Javi from CodingStones decided to share experiences that go a step further. In this course, they explain how to approach testing a frontend based on components (in this blog post, you have an introduction). I found it amazing how much frontend development has advanced. We often criticize it for its speed of change, but when you see certain benefits… 🙌

  

• Professional MEAN App with AngularJS and Webpack: This was our second frontend course, and we wanted to try out other frameworks. Juanma offered us the opportunity to build an app from scratch with AngularJS and Webpack. He has teaching experience at SkyLab, and is a phenomenon in the frontend having worked for Softonic and published books, so let's go for it!
• Hexagonal Architecture: With the CQRS course, we had already scratched the itch of sharing one of the things we most wanted to, and the next one in line was Hexagonal Architecture. We had already published on the blog about it and it had been well received. Thanks to having published the CQRS one, we could focus on all the aspects of Hexagonal Architecture without adding a Command or Query Bus. Thus, we are building a series of Software Architecture courses to advance little by little.
• AWS: Auto-scaling applications with ALB and ASG: With Armesto, we continued the series on system administration. We already had our application deployed in EC2, so it was time to scale dynamically based on the load.
• Screenshot Testing on Android and Screenshot Testing on iOS: The topic of Screenshot testing was a technique that personally intrigued me quite a bit. In these courses, I also loved to see the approach, its pros and cons, and in summary how the entire mobile testing ecosystem has advanced. Another huge effort from Karumi.

Empowering Communities 🔗

One thing we were clear about was that we couldn’t stop doing things to support the community. When we started this CodelyTV initiative, we did it with certain objectives, and CodelyTV Pro had to serve precisely to enhance them. Therefore, on January 27, we published a framework agreement for development communities. Since then, quite a few communities have joined, and that's a pleasure:

In the end, one of the most difficult tasks we have to work on is getting ourselves known. As of today, we already have 14 courses more to be published, and although it is not comparable to the ~180 that Platzi may have, we believe that the quality and type of content already constitutes a key factor. That’s why we offer communities free contests for 1 month in exchange for visibility at events. We believe that we are providing something of value in exchange for something we need through a fair deal 🙂

CodelyTV Pro Teams: Agreements with Companies 🏭

As of today, as we said, we now have courses with several characteristics that make them ideal for development teams that already work with these technologies in their daily routine. They are focused on allowing people to learn new techniques and produce higher quality code. Therefore, we consider that the fit with companies that believe in the continuous training of their employees is perfect. We want companies to outsource part of their continuous training process to CodelyTV Pro. As Armesto told us back in the day, one of the key elements at Softonic was their training process for new employees called "Softonic University". From CodelyTV Pro, we offer exactly this, but also with multiple professionals, each contributing their expertise. If you are interested, here you have all the information we published on February 13.

Changes to Improve UX: 1 New Course Every ~10 Days 🛤

The main goal of CodelyTV Pro is to be useful to people. Mainly, there are 3 possible reasons to subscribe:

• To deepen advanced topics to apply at your company with prior practical training.
• Discover new paradigms, languages, or concepts that you aren’t familiar with in an easy and enjoyable way. Just for entertainment. If we’re going to watch a series, we might as well see how to deploy on EC2, right? 😬
• Train for access to new job positions requiring certain knowledge.

One of the metrics we consider when determining if we are meeting this goal is the percentage of course completion. As of today, the average among the different courses stands at 43%. It is true that we do not force course consumption to be sequential from start to finish, but users who skip the initial lessons to get straight to the point are a minority. Generally, lower completion percentages are often addressed in online training, but we want to work to increase it. Hence, the biggest change we have made so far: The way we publish the courses. On September 20, we released the first 6 courses by only unlocking the first 3 lessons of each. From that moment we released a new lesson each week. With the second round of 7 courses on December 11, we implemented the exact same approach. However, this posed a problem: We hindered the consumption experience in an effort to increase retention. What we have done with this third round is publish an agenda where every ~10 days we release a new complete course. This allows users who want to take a course to do so from start to finish from the moment it's published, at their own pace and when it suits them best 🙂

Pairing + Follow-up 🔮

As a result of the previous change, we find ourselves benefiting the consumption experience of the courses, but potentially severely harming retention. So today, we are launching two measures to work on platform retention from a perspective that truly benefits the user 🙂:

• Pair up for pairing. I swear I heard this from Xavi Ghost in some talk. "If we work as a team, why not learn as a team?". We want to create a network of contacts among CodelyTV subscribers so that people can learn in pairs. You just need to fill out this form to sign up and we will find someone who complements you so that you can progress together. We believe it could be a more entertaining and manageable way to learn. We’ll have to see how it goes 😬
• Follow-up sessions exclusively for CodelyTV Pro subscribers. Hangouts coordinated by us (Rafa and Javi). You’ll be able to ask any questions about the CodelyTV courses. If you have an account on CodelyTV Pro, fill out this form to sign up for the first session 🙂

CodelyTV 🎥

We definitely don’t want to neglect the public CodelyTV channel. If we look at the videos published since we launched CodelyTV Pro, we see that far from slowing down, we have published more content and it has allowed us to explore new formats like El Code Today:

• Series of videos on test anti-patterns
• Interview with Raúl Raja (CTO 47degrees)
• Several Screencasts on functional programming and interviews from the LambdaWorld 2017
• Summaries of the courses and advancements of CodelyTV Pro
• The first 2 El Code Today
• Introductory streaming to Event Sourcing for the [CQRS and Event Sourcing course in Kotlin](https://pro.codely.tv/library/cqrs-y-event-sourcing-con-kotlin-y-axon-framework/67816/about/

We are experimenting with streaming as we believe in enhancing people's ability to interact live. Both El Code Today videos and the presentations of the courses will be streamed to play with these formats. We do not rule out doing a streaming session developing some functionality or something like that 🙂 One of the things we want to avoid is turning the public channel into CodelyTV Pro's spam platform. Therefore, as seen in the videos mentioned earlier, we will continue following these content lines and even attempt to ensure that the streamings of new course releases are not promotional pieces but rather provide intrinsic value as introductions, so that anyone who wants to go deeper can have the course available as an optional resource. Subscribe to the channel to stay updated!

Conclusion 👨‍🏭

We are working. We are making progress. Little by little, but things are moving forward. So… thank you!

• Thank you to the collaborators for dedicating the time and love you have put into each of the courses.
• Thank you to the subscribers because in the end, you are the ones who give meaning to why this continues.
• Thank you to the communities for believing in a fair deal that helps us get known. More info here.
• Thank you to the companies that support us to continue producing courses. More info here.

In the end, it turned out to be quite a long piece. Next time, we hope not to let so much time pass :P