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Working on Badass Courses in 2023

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Is badass dot dev wholly separate from egghead?

Yes. Sort of.

The https://badass.dev website was launched as a publishing target so that I could have a nice looking place to put things like articles and a podcast. People seem to like the band though, so it is often correlated with our work.

Technically speaking we are Skill Recordings Inc. and we have a few different properties that we publish under.

Over the past several years we've had a focus on building stand-alone developer education projects that are not directly tied to the egghead brand. The first was Testing JavaScript with Kent C. Dodds, and we've been releasing a new product every 6-12 months since then.

We are now publishing against a complete separate technical stack that we call Skill Stack. It's a Turborepo with Next.js apps and a set of packages that contain shared functionality, React components, and generall gives the feel of a unified platform while allowing each product to have it's own individual infrastructure.

The source for Skill Stack is visible here: https://github.com/skillrecordings/products

https://egghead.io is the longest running product we have in the dev-ed space. It's a subscription service focused on javascript and frontend and functions as a marketplace to connect experts with a paying audience. https://howtoegghead.com has a lot of information on it about how we think about this work.

https://totaltypescript.com https://epicreact.dev

these are different in that they are stand alone with a "web personality" for the face/presentation, but foundationally they are the same as what we produce on egghead. larger scope, focused topic.

https://skillrecordings.com has several case studies

Here's a recent launch post-mortem that outlines the overall process. https://badass.dev/launch-of-a-developer-education-product

We are working on two potential properties (early stages) that will combine what we've learned with egghead and the rest of our catalog:

datawiz.dev

Data Wiz is a marketplace that connects experts with working software engineers that want to skill up in data engineering focused on etl, ops, and infrastructure needed to build the backbone of what it requires to run ML/AI and all the cool new shit at scale

python.dev

A marketplace that connects developers that want to use python professionally on large scale projects with seasoned professionals. There's some crossover here, but this is very focused on modern production python and that ecosystem, where data wiz casts a broader net.

These properties are interesting because they are brands and help remove the "public person" aspect for the industry subject matter expert. We want to separate the expertise from the presentation and marketing while making sure everybody gets equitable royalties.

It's been easier for us so far to get "unicorns" that are both subject matter experts, have an existing audience, and are able to present the material in an efficient charismatic way.

That's limiting, so we've been looking at it as three concerns in terms of the "talent" aspect of the business and how equity is distributed for the individual learning products:

So for our normal royalty arrangement (60/40 to the creator) we have some flexibility in terms of the ratio as an opportunity to include more collaborators in the process.

Our product strategy is iterative where we work in cycles of what we call The Process 🌀

https://badass.dev/the-process

With newer working relationships we like to think smaller in scope. Low risk projects that inform future iterations with expanding scope and risk. Here's a non-exhaustive list of products.

Calling a tweet a "product" is cheeky, but a banger twitter thread delivers value and builds trust, so it qualifies.

Most of these "product types" are non-rev. We use high-value free education products as a lever for building audience trust and reciprocal feelings in the future by delivering value today.

It makes it a slow burn because this market (experienced developers) aren't interested in superficial bullshit that could be churned out in a ChatGPT session.

The world is flooded with that.

More signal, less noise.

Evergreen.

Polished, thoughtful, and fun.

Playing long term games with long term people.

That's what we are about