Why are my videos so damn long‽
Channel: Jon Gjengset
Date: 2019-11-17

I often get the question: why are your videos so damn long?
And I think the answer gets to the heart of this channel, so I wanted to address it directly in a video of its own. I'll try to keep it short!

This channel is intended for Rustaceans who are ready to move past the introductory material, or experienced programmers coming from other languages who want to see how things work in Rust world. Specifically, I wanted to give viewers experience with what it's like to write Rust code "for real". To show the entire development cycle from start to finish to demonstrate everything you'd need if you were to work with Rust yourself in the wild. That includes reading up on background material, as well as writing, debugging, and testing the code. And it turns out that those things take time. For example, our TCP implementation took three streams of five hours each, and at the end there is still much left to do.

I'm frequently asked whether I could just "edit down" the videos, and I think that would be counter to the goal of this channel. If I removed the debugging, the head-scratching, the documentation reading, I think that would get rid of one of the most valuable aspect of the stream: watching someone work through a problem, and observing all the little tricks and techniques they use as they do so. I think there is a lot of value in watching an experienced programmer get "stuck", and then observing their process for getting "unstuck", since that is so much of what you will be spending your time doing one day. This is a truthful rendition of what doing this work is like, and I think leaving in only the "good" parts would just reinforce the unfortunate artificial image we've created of "perfect" programmers that never make mistakes.

This all said, I realize that six hours is a long time. But I really don't expect you to watch it all in one go. Watch for as long as you'd like, take a break, and come back to it some other time. The video isn't going anywhere. And feel free to watch my videos at higher speed. You can always skip over parts you find uninteresting, or go back to re-watch something that you found particular interesting.

It could also be that this format is just not for you. If you feel that way, maybe try one of my open-source streams instead, which are naturally split into many smaller chunks (~90m each) first. They are also not edited, but may be more digestible. Just look for the timestamp links in the video description.

And with that out of the way, have a great day, and I hope to see you on a live-stream soon!