How I gathered the confidence to publish my first Udemy course
Tags: webdev, devlive, watercooler, laravel
Published: 2020-08-21 09:59:59

Before I dive into the details of the topic of this article. I would like to introduce myself. I am a Full Stack Freelance Developer and mostly a self-learner and an introvert.
 
I have worked around my way in the web-world by self-learning and implementing knowledge over the last 10 years and been able to contribute to organizations and open source projects. 


I have been blogging for about the last 4 years and the main purpose of writing blogs is to document the learning and solutions because I tend to forget details after a while. Here is the blog link [5balloons.info](https://www.5balloons.info).

Being a developer I am used to watching Youtube tutorials and Udemy courses. But one thing was always certain in my mind was **I could never record an online tutorial** since I don't possess the qualities of fluent speaking and coding at the same time. And thus I never even bothered about recording / Screen Casting anything.

Alright, so here is how things changed.

###Speaking at Local Laravel Meetup

During the start of 2019, A new Community got formed in the City I live for Laravel Developers ([LaravelNagpur](https://twitter.com/LaravelNagpur)) and although I haven't done any public speaking apart from College presentations I grabbed the opportunity of speaking at one of the monthly meetups.

I chose the topic that I was most comfortable with i.e. [Laravel Dusk](https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/dusk), just because I  extensively used it a lot and also wrote some blogs on it.

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Even though meetups have usually small crowds, I was nervous speaking and coding at the same time at length for about 2 hours.

Somehow I managed it and this gave me the confidence of speaking about technical topics in public. 


###Speaking at the Meetup Again

With the confidence gained from the last meetup session, I decided to give another shot at speaking and delivered a session on Getting started with TDD in Laravel

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I realized that like everything else **public speaking on technical knowledge is a skill** and if you are confident about what you are telling the audience it isn't that tough.

###Delivering A Training on JavaScript

Soon after that, I came across an opening at an Organisation where they had a requirement of a trainer who would come and give training sessions on JavaScript to their employees. 

With the confidence gained from speaking at meetups, I gave it a shot and got selected for training Job.

I delivered around 8 training sessions to the employees who were mostly senior to me and that gave a huge morale boost to my speaking skills on the technical knowledge.


###Recording the Lessons

Once the training gig got over I got an idea of doing a Video Course on Laravel Dusk since there wasn't much help available online on this topic. 

I started recording the lessons on my computer with the minimal setup and QuickTime player as the screencast recorder.

Initial videos would take me anywhere from 5-6 tries to get started and around **1 to 2 hours of time to record a 15-minute video**.

With practice, this got improved and I had around 4.5 hours of content ready to be published.

###Publishing the Course

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I launched my course in February and gave it free to the initial few students. 

Although Udemy doesn't provide much monetary value out of the course sale. I chose Udemy to publish the course just because it's popular and provides an easy interface for the user to interact with the course.

###What's Next

I don't have a plan for recording another course as of now. But this journey has given me enough confidence to speak and screencast about my knowledge in the web development.

I have started recording some screencasts for tutorials and personal documentation on Youtube [5Balloons Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF9DxqXen5oMQCr3fHJWaVA/)


###So What's the Big Deal

I wrote out this journey in an article as a reminder to myself that I was able to do something which I never thought I could.

Secondly, the importance of taking the first step. If you have a local meetup or conference in your city where you could go and deliver a talk; **DO IT**,  no matter how short it is or how easy the topic is.

You will learn much more about the topic you are speaking on and also may open new doors for you. 

Let me know in the **comments** if speaking at meetups was beneficial for you and how?