Frontend Master - Course creation

Hi! The course has finally been released. Feel free to watch it and let me know what you think—any feedback is a gift. I haven't posted anything on the channel for a long time because I decided to take a break; I was morally drained after working on this. In this post, I want to share my personal experience of creating the course, with the hope that it may help content creators in the future. 🙂

How long it took

It took about a year from the initial idea of the course to full implementation. Marc, the CEO of FM, contacted me and asked if I was interested in creating a Frontend Master course. I procrastinated for about six months, but in November 2023, I decided it was time to start 😀. I picked a tentative release date and then began the course work phase, which took five months.

In the end, all the work can be broken down into the following phases:

1. January - February: Basic structure of the course, working 1-2 hours per day.
2. March: I took a 5-week holiday and flew to Thailand. I rented an office and spent about 5-6 hours a day working on the course. During this time, I completed 70% of the content. To keep myself busy and maintain my sanity, I also attended training sessions with a personal trainer four times a week.

3. April - I arrived in London and realized that time was running out. I worked on the course for 3-4 hours each evening after work, plus all weekend. During this period, I had to put my personal life on hold for a month 😀

4. May  - I cut some of my plans, as I didn't have time to finish a few chapters I wanted to include. I drafted a slide deck (490 slides in 2.5 weeks). The first test run was 9 hours, so I had to cut some optional content to fit it into under 300 slides and 6 hours. The fatigue from the whole process accumulated significantly. However, a little miracle occurred: a cat my friend and I rescued in Montenegro last year received the necessary documents and arrived in London from the shelter :)

5. Two weeks before recording - The park was my main place for rehearsing the presentation. Overall, working with a prepared presentation proved to be not that difficult a task. I wasn't worried about my accent, and practicing the narration of material that I was well-versed in after 4 months of working on it could almost be considered a holiday 😀

TLDR

If you count everything up, the whole course probably took about 200-250 hours of time. Yeah, 6 hours of streaming = 250 hours of my work. That's not very efficient at all :) 

Challenges 🏃‍♀️

1. Dealing with presenting fear. First of all, I can characterise myself as a humble person. I didn't have much experience in public speaking, plus I never considered myself an expert in frontend. I took the offer to create a Frontend Masters course with thoughts - ‘am I really good enough for that?’. That's where it got me thinking, how many cool experts think the same way and don't talk about their experience? The main lesson - don't be afraid of how people will perceive your material, whether your knowledge is deep enough or whether you speak a foreign language perfectly. I did my first presentation when I was making $100/month, and the excitement and fear I felt didn't change with my experience, ‘tittle’ or salary in any way. So it's almost certain that even industry renowned professionals, experiencing fear before speaking is normal. 

2. Life/work balance. Any project outside of work, is a conscious investment of your free time. This time doesn't go to waste, there is no ‘sacrifice’ here. It is very important to have a beginning and an end to the project as this will help with planning. In fact, preparing for an interview organisationally is no different from any other ‘personal project’. I've worked out a framework for myself, it seems simple, but it might help you too:

- A clear daily regime. Sleep, training (3-4 times a week) - must. I trained 4 times a week in the gym + 2 hour cardio workouts in the park on weekends. 

- Planning phase / Ramp-up - preparing a work plan, writing an abstract structure, what needs to be done and approximate timeline of the whole project. 

- Active phase - maximum focus on the project, preferably not doing any work, etc. 

- No life mode - final sprint to finish the last 10-20%, forget about everything around.

- Cooldown - return to normal life and maximum rest from any ‘personal projects’

3. Dealing with burnout. I can't say I burned out, but mentally I was severely overwhelmed. When I finished the project, I promised myself that all summer long I wouldn't spend a minute at the computer or at home on the weekends. I bought a car 🚗 and every weekend now I've been doing road trips around Britain to national parks, flying a drone and take some amateur-level photos. 

Out of all the weekends in the summer, I stayed home only once to wash the car, two months of such active travelling on weekends allowed me to get back to normal, when I feel the desire to do something and enjoy life again. I guess everyone has their own recipe, share yours in the comments! 

What could have been better / Regrets 

I definitely don't have any regrets, I really like the final result and the great experience I got. I always wanted to do something good for the frontend community and I think I succeeded. 

What could have been better? Probably if I had started doing the course earlier and in a more measured way, I wouldn't have had to devote so much time to writing it on holiday. But I really dislike slow-moving projects. I like it when there's an active phase limited in time. 

What's next

I plan to finish my ‘holiday’ in August and then I'll start publishing the course on YouTube. There are some plans to outline my career plan for the next 2-3 years and grow my YouTube channel to 100K. I'll tell you all about it when I'm done 😀

Thanks you for reading!

Stay tuned.