Brian: And we're live. Welcome to PodRocket. I'm Brian, that's Kent. Hey Kent. How are you? Kent: Good. How are you doing Brian? Brian: Doing all right. It's nice to finally meet you. I feel like I've seen you around for the four years that I've been at LogRocket, but we've never actually spoken. Don't take this the wrong way, but it's kind of hard to avoid you if you're like [crosstalk 00:00:37], you're just around. How would you introduce yourself? I don't know the best way to do it. Like how do you sum it up when people ask you what you do? Kent: Yeah, normally, I have a info page for sending to folks, with just like a quick little intro to me, but yeah, I am a software engineer. I've been in industry since 2014, is when I graduated from college. And so I've been doing this for a while, JavaScript the whole time. I am a full-time educator, after having worked in industry for a few years, and doing education pretty much the entire time, just on the side. Kent: I live in Utah and I am married and have four kids. I have content on Egghead.io, Frontend Masters, and then Testingjavascript.com and Epicreact.dev are kind of my two big things that I've done. I'm pretty involved in open source as well. I created the react testing library, and a bunch of other packages that I maintain. And yeah, I'm a Google Developer expert. I don't do too much with that, but I technically am. So yeah, lots of fun stuff. Brian: Yeah, certainly, there's a lot to get into there. And you actually hit a few points that I sort of had in my mind, "This is the thing that I want to talk to him about." So I'll get to those later. I think probably the easiest place to start is Epicreact. I guess maybe could you just for everyone, just describe what it is real quick, and then I'll get into my questions about it. Kent: Yeah, sure. So Epicreact is my attempt at making the world a better place by teaching people how to make react applications really well. In my mind, most of us are engaged in some activity to make the world better, by building, using our software skills. And I think that I can make the biggest positive impact on the world by helping people accomplish whatever they're trying to accomplish, better. Kent: And so I have been teaching react for a very long time, like over half of my time in the industry really, now that I think about it. It sounds kind of weird, but for a really long time, and iterating on material, getting better as a teacher, and I've found that I don't scale very well. And on top of that, because I don't scale very well, my material and my delivery, it's not very accessible to people, because I have to charge so much because I don't scale. Kent: So I recorded everything and presented it in a way that it can be self-paced. So we don't lose all of the benefits of an actual live workshop, and made it available. And now, the price of what's effectively 11 workshops, is the cost of a single workshop. And now that can scale forever, and I can help a lot more people that way. And on top of that, we've got purchase power parody. So there are different places in the world that don't make as much money as we do here in the United States, and so we can reduce the price based on where people are coming from in the world, and that sort of thing. Kent: Then all of the material is completely open source. So you can go and work through the workshops on your own. What you're paying for, is the video, and my explanation, and walkthrough of the solutions. But it is intentionally open-sourced. And I do advertise that, and I encourage people to go through that material, because I know that the content quality is high and people will pay for it, if they can afford it, and they can make it work. Kent: My primary goal is to make the world better by teaching people how to make quality software. So, Epic React, it is effectively 11 workshops, like full day workshops, that typically takes 14 weeks or so, to get through, at a pretty, I wouldn't say aggressive pace, but a pretty strong pace. It can take longer, and people with a lot of react experience can go through it a little quicker. But yeah, there's a lot of working at the keyboard through each of these workshops. Kent: Whether I give it live or as a self-paced thing, I have found that you're most effective at remembering what I'm teaching you, if your hands are on the keyboard. And so there's a huge focus of exercises in these workshops, and exercises in your own development environment. I know that there are platforms where they'll have, like, you can do the whole exercise in the browser. And I think that's cool and interesting for something that you're just have a passing interest in learning. But if you really want to be able to build stuff, you're not going to be building stuff in the browser. Kent: And so that's why, instead of building a platform where you can do all the exercises in the browser, I instead just make it so that the workshop is set up-able, regardless of what platform you're on, so that you can work in the environment that you're actually going to be shipping code in. And so you spend a lot of time in your development environment working through these exercises. Kent: And like I said, a lot of people try to compare it to a Udemy Course. It's nothing like that. Apart from the fact I have strong feelings against Udemy. It is much easier or better compared to a semester class at a university. And we try to do things to make it even more like that, by me having office hours every week. So if you have questions you can't find an answer to, you can come to my office hours and ask. And that's not just people who have paid for the course either. That's totally open, and it's live streamed to YouTube, and anybody can come and ask me questions there. I've been doing that for quite some time now, it's been awesome. Kent: I also have learning clubs where you can put together a group of people. I kind of facilitate getting people together who want to go through any curriculum, whether it's Epicreact or Testing JavaScript, or something completely different. And I facilitate getting that group together so that they can go through their curriculum together. So we try to make up for the fact that it's not actually a live workshop, by adding stuff like office hours and learning clubs. And it really should feel like a university semester, like three credit class. Brian: One just real quick question just about that actually is, like how does that work asynchronously? Like if people have started at different points, how have you kind of worked out how they can sort of pop in for office hours? Kent: Yeah. Well for office hours, you just show up when you can, and of course, we're in a global world, and sometimes that's the middle of the night, is when I do office hours for people. So I manage that through Discord, and you can just ask your question on Discord, and then I'll answer it when I do office hours. And then you can watch the recording later. Kent: For the learning clubs, the way that works is you decide, "Okay, I want to start a learning club. I'll be the club captain." So I create what the schedule is and I can base it off of a template that Kent has made. And then I just say what time we're going to meet. So most of the time there's going to be like an hour meeting every week, where we'll just meet together. We'll talk about what we learned. We'll talk about what we're going to learn. Maybe somebody is going to present on something specific, or give some sort of talk or something. This is all kind of decided by in the learning club. Kent: But normally, it's not a synchronous experience for actually watching the videos and working through the content. This is just a group of people to meet up for about an hour every week, talk about the things that they learned, questions that they had. And sometimes, they'll invite me to one of their meetings, and I'll answer a bunch of questions and stuff too, which I kind of enjoy that too. Brian: Got it. Cool. I want to go back to something you said a minute ago, kind of about basically content quality, and thinking about that. Like I noticed that on Epicreact, you sort of go out of your way to talk about, like there is a lot of sort of low effort content that's out there. And as someone who lives sort of in the web dev content world, I see some of it, but I'm wondering sort of how you actually would diagnose low effort content. Brian: And then how is yours different? Or at least, how do you try to make it different than that or better? What are the sort of principles that go involved that go into that? Kent: Yeah, I would say that I'm a pretty good judge of low effort content because I produce a lot of it. So I produce a lot of low effort content, and as a result, lower quality, and you can find that in all of the free stuff that I do. So I feel like that can be useful and valuable, but it leaves the learner to be responsible for sifting through things and finding what they're looking for. Kent: I can't afford to spend my time curating a really awesome learning experience for people for free. And so that's why my free stuff is just like, I'll flip on Zoom and I'll live stream whatever it is that I'm working on. And that can be really useful and interesting for people. And they'll see things that I do that they're like, "Oh, I should do that." Kent: But because it's not something that I'm working on, and iterating on, and making better, you have to kind of search for that. Whereas the high quality stuff that I do on Epicreact, is absolutely been optimized for your learning experience. So it's not just a, "Oh, I kind of threw this example together, and I'm sharing it with you." Epic React is the result of me giving these workshops to thousands of people, over the course of many years, and iterating on the examples to make sure that they are teaching what I'm trying to teach. They're free of distraction, and that's what I mean when I say like low effort, low quality content that is everywhere. Kent: This is not a bad thing. It's great. Especially since it's primarily free. I take issue with when somebody is taking a person's money and then they give them a garbage content, that they spent a weekend throwing together or whatever. Kent: But, I mean, people do what they do and it's, just hate seeing people getting taken advantage of. But I make sure that when you give me money, I give you something really high quality, and that's what Epicreact is. The low quality stuff or just like, I'll shoot it off the cuff. I'm not promising you anything, and you're not promising me anything. All I'm saying is, "Hey, I was doing this thing." Kent: My blog posts are kind of similar where most of the time I write a blog post, and I don't even read it again. I'll just write it and then I'll ship it. And then I iterate on it if people complain about something, or they say something's confusing. But because it's free, I just do the bare minimum to get that useful information out there. Kent: And it helps people. Just because it's lower effort doesn't mean that it's not useful. I think that sort of thing can be useful, but I wouldn't ask for money for something that I didn't put effort into making sure that it wasn't wasting people's time. Because even free stuff is not free for the consumer. It's taking their time and I want to be respectful of that, and make sure that they understand that "Hey, this is... like to be clear, I'm literally just live streaming my thoughts and stuff, and maybe you'll find that to be useful." I can be long-winded, feel free to interrupt me. Brian: No. My interview style is to let you talk, otherwise at this point, I think in PodRocket, people have heard me talk enough. But anyways, I think like I can relate to a lot of those things. We at LogRocket, we publish a lot of content. But we try to make it as high quality as we can, but we're not always going to get things right. And so I really do rely on the audience, and to their credit, they'll always let me know, like, "This is dumb. This is not right." Like, "Okay, well, thanks." Brian: Hopefully, we don't do that too often, but I get it. And we don't take money, but yeah, I mean, there is a little ad at the bottom that says, like, "You should maybe be interested in LogRocket," maybe, or not, it's up to you. But there is sort of a trade off of like services for goods. So yeah, there's not a whole lot that's free. Brian: I do kind of wonder about, well, two things, I guess. The first thing is like, when you are putting together a workshop or a course, I guess we'll start with the workshops. Are you looking back over the course of however long you've been working on it, and then kind of, like you said, iterating over time? Do you then kind of go to other people, and share your ideas and look for feedback, or is it all just kind of like, "I know this is in my head and I'm going to transmit it to the audience that way." Kent: So I don't consume other people's content very much. I do a little bit of that, but very rarely. Like most of the time, if I buy a course, it's from somebody that I know and respect, and I think that they're awesome. And I just want to give them money. I don't consume other people's content much. Sometimes I have to see how they present it, and see like, "Okay, what are some tricks of the trade or whatever, that I can learn from this person?" Kent: And for like developing a course, it's actually kind of hard to talk about course versus workshop, versus talk, versus blog posts. All of this content creation feeds into itself. Probably half of my blog posts, I came up with because I wanted to reference it in my workshop material. Kent: And in fact, lots of my libraries came out of, I'm teaching something in a workshop and I need to show you all of these different things you've got to do before you can get to the end result. And I realized that all of these things could actually just be a library. And now I just tell them to install the library, and save myself a lot of time. Of course, it's always good to teach them what the library is doing. And I do that too. Kent: And that's actually where React Testing Library came from, was exactly that. It was just like, "This is too much work and Enzymes' no good, so we're going to make our own thing." So when I'm developing a course, I actually, now, I will create a workshop for it first, and I'll iterate on that workshop and then record that into a course. Kent: And so course is kind of a self paced workshop for me now. Egghead is a little bit unique because for me, Egghead isn't a place where like, "Let's work through this together." It's like, "Watch me go through the solutions." But Epicreact is different where it's intentionally, "I want you to work through this, and then watch the solution as I work through it." Kent: So when it's a workshop, I am delivering it to real people who need the information. They can ask me questions and after giving it a dozen times or so, I have a pretty solid idea of the questions that people are going to ask. And so I typically answer those questions before they're asked. Whether that be in the supporting material, like the written supporting material, or like in the instructions and stuff, or in my solution as I'm presenting the solution, I say, "And we're going to do this, and we can't do it this way, because if we did, then this other problem would happen," or whatever. Kent: So I kind of internalize those sorts of questions after having so much experience in delivering it. And I think that's one of the things that makes Epic React in particular, and Testing JavaScript, such kind of a standalone when it comes to quality, because it's not just something that I thought of one weekend and threw together, and hoped that it was effective in teaching. It's something that I know is effective in teaching, because I've taught it to hundreds or even thousands of people. Also, part of my teaching process is, I get feedback on every exercise from the people who are going through it. Kent: So once they're finished, once we finish, I give them two minutes to write down some feedback, write down what they learned. And so I have, I haven't looked recently, but probably somewhere around 8,000 lines of feedback, from people on my various workshops that I use to... anytime I'm going to present the workshop again, I'd go through all of the material myself. And I look through every bit of feedback, and I'm tweaking and improving things. So by the end of it, when I go to record, I'm not worried about whether somebody is going to have a question because I know that I'm answering those. And then like in the off chance that somebody has something really specific, that's what office hours is for. And that's proven to be very effective. Brian: What do you use to sort of parse and identify patterns and stuff with 8,000 lines of feedback? Kent: My eyes. It's a Google Form, and there's a link at the bottom of every exercise, that is I have a little script that I run to update it, so that it pre-fills what exercise it is, and different things like that. It's all the same form for everyone, but it pre-fills a couple of fields. And then also when you set up the workshop, you can enter your email address, and it will, pre-fill that field for you as well, because that's different for everybody. Kent: And so then they just click on that link, and it has all that info prefilled, and they just answer a couple of quick questions. And so then when I'm working on a workshop, and I'm like, "Okay, exercise two, we're going to talk... I need to iterate on this." I'll take that giant spreadsheet, put a filter on it to just give me the feedback on exercise two. It takes forever, but I go through it all. And the workshops are amazing now because of the feedback that people have given. Brian: Yeah, the reason I ask is sometimes we put up open-ended question, like polls on the LogRocket blog, and we get a lot of answers. And I was hoping that you had a magic answer for me on how I would do that besides... yeah. Kent: You probably you know this but just in case, for listeners, it's really valuable to be able to hear somebody's feedback and say, "I hear you, but I'm not going to make any changes, and I know why." So for me, like maybe early on, I would take every bit of feedback and think that this is what I should do. They're absolutely right. But over time, I've learned that they may feel that way, but I'm the educator here, and I know what I'm doing. And so, yeah, I don't always follow the advice that people give me. Kent: But then another important aspect of this or that's different from what you're doing, versus what I'm doing, is yours is going out to your audience, the people who are reading your blog. And that can just be just about anybody. Mine is going to my audience of people who have actually gone through the workshop, and they can tell me their actual lived experience in going through my workshop material. And so our audiences are a little bit different, so you probably get way more feedback than I do. And it's probably a lot bigger challenge to parse through all of that, and know what's useful and what's not. Brian: For sure. It's all really helpful, and I'm always really impressed, honestly, and I don't know why I was surprised, but people are really, generally speaking, are not rude. But also they're very generous with their time in answering the questions, which is really nice. One other question that I was thinking about when you were kind of talking about your process is, so we don't necessarily pay so much attention to kind of other people's content unless you know and like them, and we're thinking we're being a little bit protective of the vision that we've created, simply because like you said, you're the educator. Brian: Do you ever look to maybe more, I guess we'll call them kind of traditional learning models, like the university setting? Think about kind of either how you compare or what you could borrow? We did an episode, or I did an episode not so long ago, just kind of about how a university compares to bootcamps, for example. So I wonder what your thoughts on are all that stuff. Kent: So there's a book that I read a few years ago called, Make It Stick, that talks about... Yeah, it looks like it's familiar to you. Brian: Is that the orange one? Is the cover orange with like duct tape on it? Is that it? Kent: I think it's blue, but I listened to it, so I'm not... Brian: Okay. Kent: I'm pretty sure. But man, that book changed how I think about learning and teaching, and that was very impactful for me. And one of the sticking points for me or problems that I had with that book, was that it seemed to come from the perspective of it was written for the learner. But you could very easily translate that to the teacher and how can I facilitate these things for my learners? Kent: And it was written from the perspective of, "You've got a long time, like an entire semester with these people," and that doesn't work for me because I have a day. Sometimes I have a couple of days if we're doing like several workshops for the same group of people. Kent: And so applying some of the techniques like spaced repetition and stuff, is difficult to do in the course of a day, because space repetition is typically like, "Okay, so we do it today. Now we'll do it tomorrow. And then we'll do it in three days, and then we'll do it in a week." And we would just repeat that. I can't do that. And so I actually emailed the authors and I said, "How would you adapt to some of the things that you teach or some of the research that you've done, to what it's like to teach for a single day?" Kent: And they gave me a couple of bits of advice that like, "Hey, send them an email or something after, or encourage them to go through the material again in a week or something," which I do. But as far as like adapting things from a university setting, I actually have been invited by my Alma mater, BYU, to come and teach for them. And I was really close to accepting that, but I hesitated to do it because I realized that I could spend that time serving like... because they're not going to pay me well, like it's a university for crying out loud. Kent: And so I wouldn't be doing it for the money. It would be for the joy of teaching and the experience. And I realized that I could probably do the same thing for less privileged individuals. And that's actually where office hours came from, where I decided to start doing these regular, and I invested more in learning clubs to help with that too. Kent: So anyway, as far as borrowing stuff, I have a master's degree in information systems. I love all my teachers, they were great, but I guess one of the things that I learned from my time at the university was that I feel like I learned a lot more relevant information when I was doing my internship, actually working on stuff than I did when I was in the university. Kent: And so that was frustrating and that was something that I've carried with me is, “Hey, Kent make sure that you're staying relevant and make sure that you know what's going on in the broader world,” so that when I'm teaching people, I'm teaching them stuff that is relevant to what's going on in the world. Kent: So I wouldn't say that I borrowed really positive stuff from university in the way that they teach. I'm sure there are things that I'm missing that they do really well and maybe there is some things that I have borrowed without knowledge or without realizing I have. But I feel like the teaching style or the way that courses are taught in university are lacking. I think they could be better. But I don't have time to go and do it myself. Brian: No, I get it. I had a similar experience, when I started managing people. I didn't read a bunch of management books, which I would probably not hurt, but I remembered all of the things I didn't like about maybe former managers and I just promised myself to not do those things. So I didn't take any positive lessons away necessarily, but I took it as like, “Don't do that,” and it seems to be working out okay. So I can relate. Brian: So that's a good, you mentioned about staying current, which I think is a great segue into something else I wanted to ask is, how do you stay current? I know that, I mean, it is a challenge, right? It's certainly a challenge for us. We're constantly updating posts and taking posts down when it doesn't make sense anymore. For your courses and then workshops, what are you doing to kind of make sure that things are current? Kent: Yeah. So I do update Testing JavaScript and Epic React. And I do make sure that if something is not... I don't put dates on anything because that is a false signal to whether something's relevant. And people are always begging for dates, like, “Please, I need to know when this was last updated.” “No, you don't actually need to know when it was last updated. You need to know how relevant it is and how useful it is to today.” Kent: Because there are blogposts that people have written 20 years ago that are still relevant and useful today. So I don't put dates on my content, but I will make sure that if it is out of date, that you know? And so that's why I keep, just in general, I try to keep things up to date and I make sure that people know that when things are not up to date, that they know. Kent: So as far as myself, keeping myself relevant, and by the way, I do update my material too. So it's not just, “Send it out into the world and hope that it stays relevant for long enough.” I do update things over time. But yeah, keeping myself relevant that was the biggest fear that I had when I went full-time teacher, actually. I knew that I was a good teacher, I knew that I would be able to make money doing this, I was already doing that on the side. I'd already launched Testing JavaScript when I was still at PayPal. Kent: And Testing JavaScript made me more than my PayPal salary. And that's when I decided, “Okay, I guess I can do this full-time.” And so it, wasn't a concern of like, “Wow, is this going to work?” whatever. That wasn't the concern for me. The concern was, “Am I going to be able to do this and teach people the right stuff?” Kent: I don't want to teach people stuff that doesn't apply to industry. Because again, my goal is to make the world better by teaching people how to make better software. And if I mislead, then I'm doing the opposite of my goal. So that was my biggest fear, and I kind of decided that I was pretty good at staying on the leading edge of everything already. Kent: When I was at PayPal, I represented them on the TC39, so I was literally on the committee that decided the fate of JavaScript. And I wasn't able to be that anymore because I left PayPal, but I was always using the latest versions of libraries and all of that stuff. So it was kind of in my nature to stay on the latest, and then I also decided that if I ever felt like I was losing touch, I would take a break for a while to build something real. Kent: Because when you're an educator, you're building demos and everything demos well. You can take anything and it demos fine. So it's when you try to apply it to what all of your learners are doing is when things get sticky. So I wanted to make sure that I kept myself at least in the loop of what my learners were actually doing. Kent: And so I decided, “You know what, if I do feel like I'm losing relevance or losing touch, then I'll just take a break and I'll build something real, or maybe I'll even just get a job. And we'll just do this for a couple of years and I'll go back and get a job. And then we'll just alternate or something. We'll see what the future holds.” And for the last seven or eight months, I've been working almost exclusively on a giant rewrite of my website. Kent: And this isn't just your regular developer portfolio with markdown blog posts and stuff. This is authentication, custom-made, hand-rolled authentication. I've got my own Postgres database and Redis, and I'm deploying on fly to multiple regions all over the world. It's actually really cool how it all works. It's super fast anywhere you are in the world, and it's a remix app, so using the latest and greatest of what's available. Kent: And we've got user data and all. All of the stuff that you typically find. I haven't measured it recently, but we're probably around 25,000 lines of code that I have primarily written. I have hired somebody to help me implement some of the designs that our designers came up with, but yeah, I'm working on a team to build a product, an actual thing. Kent: And so that was part of my plan all along is, “After I've done this for a while as a full-time educator, let's build something real and make sure that I know what I'm doing still.” And it turns out I do. I haven't had any big surprises, like, “Oh, man, I sure wish I hadn't taught people to do that.” Nope, everything that I've been teaching people for all this time has been solid advice for the time. Now, there have been changes. I used to tell people, CSS in JS was the bomb. It still is, but there are better things. And remix didn't exist when I was teaching all that stuff too. So like the ecosystem evolves, but I'm comforted to know that even the stuff that is out there now, is still really solid advice that I've been giving people. Kent: And so validation of what I've been teaching has been really helpful. And now that I'm starting to get to the end of this rewrite and get it launched, I'm starting to look forward to creating new workshops based on and improving the existing workshops. So new workshops on new topics, and then taking the older topics and upgrading them further based on the things that I've learned in building this website. Kent: So if anybody out there is creating content and they're like, “Ah, I want to stay in touch,” build something real. Don't do some little demo thing. Put together a TikTok for cats or something with the whole thing, and then now you have a ton of things. I have countless blog posts that I can right now based on what I've done in my website and at least like four new workshops that I have ideas for. So anyway, that's that. Brian: I again, just thinking about my experience, it's like, whenever we get pitches from authors, the best ones are always ones where it's either, it's a problem that they've encountered while building something real, whether it's at work or their own projects versus something like, “I think I know...” every single time. It's a universal truth, an immutable truth, at least for me, as far as I'm concerned. Is that the plan for you maybe going forward? So you're on a few platforms now, or at least your content is. Is it all, are you thinking about consolidation onto your site? That's kind of where you're headed or? I don't want to blow up your spot and expose you. Kent: Yeah. I have recently been wanting to consolidate things, not necessarily the domain but who I'm working with. And so I have created content for Frontend Masters and that ends up on Pluralsight as well. I've done stuff for Thinkster and then of course Egghead and I've decided that it's best for me, just in the number of people I have to coordinate with, if I just focus on working with one set of people. Kent: And so I chose Egghead, they've been fantastic, and they are my collaborators on my Egghead courses of course, but also Testing JavaScript and Epic React. So they've done all of the stuff I don't want to do including my website. They're responsible for finding the designers and the illustrators and the person that I hired to help me with implementing designs. Kent: I've got another guy who's really good at visual animations and stuff like that is going through them. So I just work with them to do all of this stuff, like the business-ey things that I don't like to do so that I can focus on the stuff that I do like to do, and that's one of my secrets to being so productive. So consolidating mostly in the people that I work with, I'm not super concerned about getting it on the website. Kent: One thing that is important to me is making sure that I'm not the Epic React guy, but that I'm Kent and I created epic react. You have a lot of these people who have tied their entire image to something that is not them but a thing that they created. And so when that thing that they created is no longer relevant for some reason, like when I was doing AngularJS, if I'd tied myself to an AngularJS course that I made, and then I decide, “Okay, I'm leaping and going to react,” and then I say, “Hey, I'm Kent,” you're like, “Who is Kent?” And I say, “Well, I'm the one who made that.” “Oh, now I know who you are.” No, no, no. Kent: For me, everything is Kent. So it's epicreact.dev by Kent, testingjavascript.com by Kent. And then all my podcasts, I have Chats with Kent, I'm starting a new podcast called Call Kent, where people can literally call me and I respond and it turns into a podcast. And I have Office Hours with Kent, Live with Kent, everything I put myself forefront so I can keep people in my tribe committed to me with whatever direction that I decide to go. Kent: And so whether or not it all ends up on the same domain is less relevant to me. It's more about whether the people know who created this thing. And that's me. Brian: Yeah. Well, again, it feels like it makes sense to be protective of one's own brand, but look, I do want to pull on that thread just about Call Kent, because that sounds super interesting to me. What is the, we're calling Kent and then we're recording the conversations and then that's the podcast? Tell me more. Kent: Yeah, it's not exactly a call. I said, literally they're calling me, but not exactly. So on my website, you'll go to KentCdodds.com/call when this is released, or calls, it'll redirect. And you can see a list of all the podcast episodes and then you can record your own and right there in the browser, you just say record, and you ask your question or you make your observation about the world and say, what do you think of that or whatever. Just like a two minute little question. Kent: Something that can be answered over audio. You can't say, “Hey, look at this code.” And then I look at it on my admin page to see all the calls that have been recorded and you enter in, the title and the description for the podcast and some keywords and stuff. So I look through those, I listen to the one that sounds interesting that I want to respond to, I'll listen to it, and then I'll hit record, I'll record my response, I hit accept and it goes off onto my server, sticks them all together with some bumpers and stuff, and then uploads it to my podcast service. And within minutes it's on the podcast. Brian: That is a really cool idea. Kent: Yeah. It's taken me a long time to get it to work, but it works now. So just working on the final touches and it'll be released as part of my website in the next couple of weeks. Brian: Well, I mean, I saw that not too long ago, Cameo started doing Cameo Calls. Maybe you could do that afterwards. Kent: Oh yeah. That's interesting. Brian: Where it's like, it's more obviously live, but same idea-ish. Kent: Yeah, maybe I could spin this out as a service and make my own Cameo competitor. Brian: I don't see why not. Kent: Talk about building something real. Brian: That's a fair point. I guess we could do... I don't think I could do that. I don't think we have any Cameo-related items at LogRocket that would useful. Kent: I think for me it works really well because people are constantly asking me questions. And that's what Office Hours is. It's just a bunch of questions and those are really valuable. And I appreciate being able to answer them, but I think for lots of them, when they can just be answered over audio only, having it in a consumable podcast that people can subscribe to and they can listen to, I plan on answering a call every day, and so, yeah, you'd get a call on your podcast player every day. Kent: It's only like 10 minutes. Really pretty quick. So I think it's, I guess kind of in general, one of the secrets that I've uncovered over the years on content creation is that we're constantly creating content. We're always creating content. A conversation with a co-worker about your get strategy at work is you're creating content. The difference between a content creator and everybody else is that they capture that in some form, whether they write it down or they record it or something, and then they make it consumable. So they distribute it. Kent: And that's the difference between just a normal person, because literally everybody's creating content, so just a normal person and somebody who actually is a content creator is by making that content that you've created just naturally a consumable piece of information. Brian: I noticed that you put a contact creator in air quotes. Nobody likes that term. I just can't think of a better term, but I don't know anyone who's... It's better than influencer, I suppose. So just my last question that really is, we're talking about creating content, what, this is a little bit of a selfish question, but what do you think the role of corporations' content creation? What are the things that either they're doing right, wrong, you wish that they were doing better. Where do they fit kind of in the educational spectrum for, at least for web devs or developers period. Kent: Yeah. You know, LogRocket is fairly unique. Like I said, I don't consume other people's content very much. That includes blog posts. In fact, blog posts are the thing I consume the least because I don't read very well. I have a hard time reading. So I do consume podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I listen at 3x and so that I can consume as much as possible in as little time as I can manage. Kent: So I can't really speak to what you are doing right or wrong, but my impression is that corporate content strategies, especially around things... And I want to be totally clear. This is not a judgment on the LogRocket or anything. Because I have not read your content. I don't know where you stand on the spectrum. Brian: I promise you there's no way you'll hurt my feelings at this point. I've heard it all, and no. Believe me. Kent: So my biggest fear with a company producing a lot of content is you have to, when you create content you want to at least make sure that it's of high enough quality that it's not wrong. And it's really difficult to do that if you are not an expert in that field, and of course as a company, you can't be an expert in all of the things that you're blogging about. And so naturally you reach out to other people to ask them to create this content for you. Kent: And then you, I guess, unless you do really rigorous background checking and peer reviews and stuff, you kind of have just have to take it for what it is and hope that it's right. And the reason that I have that impression or that worry is that I have gotten reached out to, by countless companies asking me to write about various things, some of which I have zero experience with at all. Kent: And so it just really concerns me because I'm able to say, “No,” because I'm gainfully employed in what I'm doing, but I imagine that there are a number of people who are not in that position or really could use the extra cash. And they say, “I don't know anything about this, but if they're going to give me money to write about this thing, then who cares? I'm going to take that.” And so I just remember very early in my career I got asked by, I'm hesitating to call them out, but I'm going to say it, Packt Publishing. Kent: It's a book publishing company. They're pretty well known for doing this, so that's why I don't feel too bad for calling them out because I've had several friends who say this happened to them, but yeah, they reached out to me to write something about, I don't know, it was like a Java thing or something. Kent: I know zero about it. Nothing. I don't know where they got in their mind that I would be a good candidate for writing a book about this. I mean, I've totally lost any confidence in anything that I get from that company, because they'll just take anything from anybody. That's actually kind of the same way I feel about Udemy where they literally will take anything from anybody and take it where people can download my content or west boss's content and upload it to Udemy and make money on it. Kent: And now Udemy is saying that we're responsible for filing a take-down notice, whereas what really should be, is they should actually like curate their stuff and make sure that it's not stolen content. So this is one of the thing, and it's not just that about Udemy that I don't like, they are also jerks to their instructors, but it worries me when I see a company that doesn't know anything about the content that is being produced under its name. Kent: And it's not necessarily a bad thing so long as they have the right structures in place to make sure that the content that's being produced is of high quality. Because when it's produced under a company that has clout then people will just naturally assume that it's correct. And so they will follow the advice that... At least inexperienced people will just kind of assume, “Oh, well this came out of such and such company, so therefore it must be better than whatever my assumption of what I should do is.” Kent: And so it's just really important to me that there is a level of curation and quality to make sure that the content is correct. Anyway, that's the biggest concern that I have for a company making content that is outside of what it's... So a good example of a company making content that's inside of what it does is Cloudinary. They have a lot of content on images and it's really... They get this and they know it and I trust them because that's what they do. Kent: So if they started producing content on totally different stuff, they would have to just implement some sort of quality control to make sure that it's accurate stuff. Brian: Yeah. I think that is a pretty measured response, honestly. It's fair. I mean, we have the same thing. People will take our feed and re-host it and then, which I wouldn't even really mind that much because Google doesn't, they know where it came from originally, but it would be nice if you asked. It would be those kinds of things. But yeah, there is the... Kent: You know, it bothers me when people make money on it. And so they're paying this other person for something that I spent time producing. And the person who's doing the buying might not even realize that they're buying stolen goods, And that bothers me a lot. I really don't like that. Brian: Yeah. I think there's that, I don't know how open source versus instructors. It feels like both of those groups almost constantly have to justify like, or at least explain like, “Hey, I need to make a living. I need to make money somehow.” And I almost feel like maybe open source folks are a little bit further down the road than instructors, but I'm not sure. Maybe that could just be my own impression, but- Kent: I'm in both of those categories and I have not made very much in my open source stuff. Very little. Not directly anyway. I've gotten jobs thanks to my open source and stuff, so there's that, but as far as directly getting money in open source is kind of like getting picked for the NBA. You look at all of these people are like, “Well, look at that person. They're making bank on that.” It was like, “All right. Yeah. Good luck being the next Michael Jordan or LeBron James or whatever.” Brian: Cool. Those are the questions that I have for you. What should we, this is the part of the podcast where we say, “Do you have anything you'd like to plug?” I feel like we talked about some things. Is there anything else? Is there any specific thing that we didn't mention that you wanted to get in there? Kent: Sure. Yeah. So I'll just mention, of course, epicreact.dev, testingjavascript.com, kentcdodds.com is going to look really awesome in the next couple of weeks. I don't know when this gets published, but eventually you should go there and look at it because it is great. And sign up for an account on there. There's really cool stuff we can do with for you there. The Call Kent Podcast will be really cool. Kent: And then my Discord community is awesome. I used to be way on Twitter all the time and everything. Now, I pretty much share most stuff just on Discord because it's just an awesome place to hang out, and I have my own Discord community that is just a really cool place to be. So you can find a link to that on my website. Brian: Cool. Well, it was a pleasure, man. Thanks so much for coming on. Kent: Yeah. Likewise. Thanks Brian. Brian: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us @podrocketpod on Twitter, or you could always email me even though that's not a popular option. It's brian@logrocket.