Most programmers start off good at building and bad at marketing. These videos will correct that. I teach everything I've learned in growing Oxbridge Notes from an MVP no-one knew about to a business reaching over $30k/month revenue. As a programmer myself, I focus on marketing techniques that leverage tech skills for scalable/automatable marketing. Therefore I'll teach mass SEO, how to online advertise profitably, how to leverage Analytics to evaluate your effectiveness, what email marketing campaigns to use to double customer lifetime value, how to AB test conversion optimizations, and much more.

Episode #1

Bird's Eye View of a Profitable Web App

March 22, 2020

1. Bird's Eye View of a Profitable Web App

We take a look at the main flows through a web application I've been running for over ten years, OxbridgeNotes. You'll see each side of this marketplace, along with its admin area. You'll visit Google Analytics to see the traffic figures, and afterwards we'll return to the command line and analyze the codebase size, showing off some handy tools in the process.

2. MVP & Origin Story

3. SEO Strategies For Web Apps - Part I

4. SEO Strategies For Web Apps - Part II

5. How To Use Google Analytics I: Ecommerce & UTM

6. Google Analytics II: Demographics & Customer Lifetime Value Reports

7. Google Analytics III: Location, Device & Browser Reports

8. Google Analytics IV: Content Drilldown, Checkout Behavior, and Benchmarking Reports

9. The 6 Fundamental Principles of Paid Advertising

10. Google Analytics V: Events, Goals, Referrals Reports

11. Google Analytics VI: Adwords, ROAS, Treemaps

12. Google Analytics VII: Search Terms, Time Lag, Users Flow Reports

13. Google AdWords I: Get 1000s of Keyword Ideas with the Keyword Planner

14. Google AdWords II: Ad Group Cost Forecasts with the Keyword Planner

15. Google AdWords III: The Five Kinds of Keyword Match Types

16. Basics of Advert Copywriting: 4 Psychological Principles

17. How to Write an Advert I: Image and Headline

19. How to Write an Advert II: Copy and URL

20. Workflows for Optimizing Ad Copy, and Intro to Statistical Significance

Series 1

System Design for Web

Learn system design and architecture in context, via a behind-the-scenes tour of Oxbridge Notes, a profitable web app serving over 200,000 requests/month for 10 years (albeit with bleeding edge code). See how performance is improved with queues, DB indexes, memcached, full-text search, micro-services, and HTTP caching, how production errors are tracked and escalated when necessary, how classes are organized into a sensible architecture, how its containerized for continuous integration testing, how git is used to minimize conflicts and more. At the end, you'll know exactly how to do the same and be able to ace any system design interview.

Episode #1

Data Integrity: Null Constraints and Check Constraints

June 13, 2020

1. Data Integrity: Null Constraints and Check Constraints

Data is more important than code, therefore the most important job you, as a programmer, have is to design a system that allows for a simple, constrained, and predictable set of data. In this episode, I'll discuss how null constraints can reduce the number of types your program has to deal with, thereby simplifying your code. Then I discuss how check constraints can force data to take a limited (and more useful) range of values. Lastly I'll explain why it's better to carry all this out at the database level rather than at the Ruby/Python/Php/JS level.

2. Data Integrity: Foreign Keys and Uniqueness Constraints

3. Data Integrity: SQL Cascades, Transactions, DB Design, and Continuous Validation

4. Continuous Integration Testing: Basics + What to Test

5. Integration Testing Best Practices Part I

6. Integration Testing Best Practices Part II

7. Error Tracking and Monitoring: Part I

8. Error Tracking and Monitoring: Part II

9. Production Logs: Getting The Most Out Of Them

10. Why You Need Downtime Notifiers

11. Website Monitoring Tools I: Monit and Syslog Alerts

12. Website Monitoring Tools II: APMs, HTTP status aggregated stats

Series 2

#vim

Vim

The Vim editor is a timeless investment in your tech skills, one of the biggest force-multipliers in your programming career, and profoundly fun to boot - at least once you've gotten the hang of it. Over my decade of using Vim as my only editor, I've written myself a guide to elegantly handling hundreds of situations with minimal keystrokes. By the time you finish watching these videos, you and Vim will have merged to become one beautiful code-editing machine. :wq

Episode #1

Advanced Vim Workflows

April 05, 2020

1. Advanced Vim Workflows

Watch three typical workflows of someone with a decade of Vim experience. I'll edit 40 files at once with :argdo, turn bags of JavaScript functions into classes with a macro, then create a keyboard shortcut for playing the mp3 under cursor.

2. Fluent File Navigation

3. Vim's Versatile CLI

4. IDE-like Refactors, Snippets, Tests, Hover Documentation, Commenting, and Git

5. Vim Autocomplete Mini-Overview

Series 4

#dependencies

Timeless Programming Paradigms

Despite the buzzword bingo and proliferation of fad frameworks, the important things in tech don't change. These videos focus on workflows, skills, and ideas with an expected lifetime of an entire career. What workflows reduce errors, how does UNIX work, how can you debug by peeking one-layer-deeper in the stack, how does the HTTP protocol work, what truths about humans are relevant when writing code etc.

Episode #1

The Hidden Costs of Software Dependencies

May 03, 2020

4. The Hidden Costs of Software Dependencies

The ease of running npm install x masks the long-term costs of including software dependencies. In this episode, I go through my personal worst-of situations with the Ruby and JavaScript dependencies of Oxbridge Notes over a 10-year timeframe. I talk about dependency hell, dependency deprecation/abandonment, how one dependency begets another, and how over-reliance of dependencies rob you of your ability to familiarize yourself with programming fundamentals, the stuff that doesn't change out from under your feet from year to year.

1. How To Make Less Dumb Mistakes When Programming

2. How To Avoid Dumb Code Mistakes Part II

3. How To Avoid Dumb Code Mistakes Part III

5. How to Learn to Code I: Use SRS and Anki

6. How to Learn to Code II: Keep a Code Diary

7. The No-Framework Framework: JavaScript Without React Part I

8. The No-Framework Framework: JavaScript Without React Part II

Semicolon & Sons

Semicolon & Sons

Hardcore Programming Screencasts

@jackkinsella

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Series 3

Get Your First 1000 Users

Series 1

System Design for Web

Series 2

Vim

Series 4

Timeless Programming Paradigms

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