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Comment by semicolonandson | Hacker News Reader

For whatever reason, this big picture knowledge about how to bring everything together to make effective software is rarely taught explicitly. Rather we mostly see guides to the latest syntax or features of the framework du jour. Having been in this game for over a decade, I know full well this sort of surface knowledge has the shortest shelf-life.

If you've got more of a taste for the slower-changing, thoroughly unsexy principles behind writing stable and maintainable software, I'm devoting myself to exploring these ideas with my screencasts - topics like data integrity, building instrumentation for knowing what's happening in your code (esp. in production), non-brittle tests, leaning on unix tools and the OS to debug things, the timeless editor vim, etc.

The first 12 videos are available over at https://www.semicolonandsons.com/ -- it's a new side-project of mine that I hope will bring some value.

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I'd like to watch these and appreciate you've put a decent chunk of work into the content.

But...as a desktop user the video player only has two screen sizes...too small to be readable and full screen which is pretty useless because I like to multitask. Could I suggest offering different sized embedded players, or something that resizes with the browser window?

Hope you don't take this as negative criticism.

Not that it excuses the poor choice of embedded player, per se, but:

  youtube-dl https://www.semicolonandsons.com/episode/sql-cascade-transactions-db-design -fhd_mp4-720p
  # -F for alternatives to hd_mp4-720p

works fine. (I don't care for video tutorials (vs text) due to temporal illegibility (things not being on screen long enough to read), but it definitely looks readable enough in terms of spacial size.)

With Firefox you can use the Picture-in-Picture feature for videos and size it as you like. For me it worked fine to read what's in the video.

Additionally you can then watch the movie and have i.e. your terminal open.

Heh...I never even noticed that before, thanks!

I very much welcome the feedback. Full-screen is something I personally didn't consider.

I use the Wistia player and it seems to be fully responsive on page resizes -- the issue is more that the player is constrained by the size of its column in the css. I'll put that on the list of things to sort out once I get around to hiring a designer. The css at present is an extremely rough proof of concept.

With a bit of fiddling, bookmarking this wee snippet does the job good enough:

    javascript:(function(){document.querySelector('.lg\\:mx-8').remove();document.querySelector('.lg\\:w-3\\/5').setAttribute('class', 'w-full');})()

It removes the right hand panel and the width restriction in the player's containing div. Until of course you change your markup :)

Bookmarked, will watch after vacation. This seems like exactly the gap in my knowledge I want to fill, but could not find the resources.

Sounds great! Please include transcripts if possible!

I agree. I'm already trialing out a freelancer for this.

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