Elixir Streams hits a 100 videos! 🎉

👋 Hello, hello!

As of last Tuesday, Elixir Streams has a 100 tips!

Since Elixir Streams has hit this milestone (and I’m amazed it did), I wanted to look back and share some history, some behind the scenes, and some of my experiences.

When, why, how

I published my first tip on Twitter on December 1st, 2022.

A few days before, I had seen someone retweet a video from Wes Bos. I liked the format of explaining a concept in a short video. So, when I was about to share the new --info flag for mix phx.routes, I thought, “why don’t I make a video about it instead?”

I recorded the video and threw it out there without further thought.

My first tweet with a video tip

Since I had created a video, I thought, “why not put it in YouTube too?” So, a few days later I did.

I had already done recordings for my Testing LiveView course, so I already had some familiarity with recording and editing videos. But as you can see, my first tips were a bit rough – I didn’t even know that Twitter’s videos were supposed to be square and didn’t know what YouTube shorts were at all.

Honestly, I didn’t think much about it. I didn’t have a grand plan to keep doing them. It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing… so, naturally, it stuck.

The website

After publishing a good number of tips in Twitter and YouTube, I figured I would continue publishing them.

But the videos were spread across Twitter, YouTube (and even LinkedIn). I wanted to have a single website where I could put all the videos, and maybe even a newsletter sign up so people could get notified when I published them.

Thus, in June 2023 the elixirstreams.com website was born.

Elixir Streams homepage now

One huge benefit of having the YouTube videos on the website is that YouTube doesn’t show ads when the videos are embedded! 🥳

I never liked that YouTube automatically included ads in my videos that I couldn’t turn off. I’m not in their ad program, so I can’t reject them. So, at first, I didn’t want to send people to YouTube since they’d get ads. But, I feel perfectly comfortable sending people to the Elixir Streams website. No ads.

The website tech

The website has never used fancy tech. It’s just another static site in my collection.

I chose to do a static site since:

• (a) I don’t really need dynamic pages, and
• (b) I can host the website for free with Render.

At the time, I really hoped there would be good Elixir static site generator, but I couldn’t find one. I still don’t think we have a mature, well-used, and well-maintained one. I might be wrong, but that was my impression at the time after doing a little bit of research.

I thought about building one… it would be awesome. But I was trying to publish videos, not build a static site generator. So, with a great deal of effort, I resisted the yack shave. Thankfully, I’d used Jekyll and Gatsby before, so I could pick one of them.

With Jekyll (that’s what this website you’re reading is built with), there’s some pain when setting up. But once I have the website running, it’s usually pretty smooth sailing.

Gatsby, on the other side (that’s what my TDD Phoenix site is built with) has always a huuuuge pain. It’s probably a phenomenal static site generator, but for the amount of time I wanted to spend configuring it, I’ve always found it a royal pain to go back and do anything with my TDD Phoenix website.

So, I decided against Gatsby and went with Jekyll.

The recording tech

I’ve upgraded my tech over time, but probably not as much as I should’ve. But hey, I’m doing this for free! 😅

I upgraded whatever Logitech camera I had to an Elgato Facecam Pro. I also bought a better source of light (an Elgato ring light) – which made me look like a corpse, until I discovered (very recently, to my shame) that you can adjust the temperature of the light.

I’ve always used Screenflow to edit videos. I’m happy with it. And I’ve always used an Audio Technica ATR2100 mic. A former colleague of mine who is a video editor (👋 hi Thom) recommended them to me back in 2019. I remember him saying something like this, “that’s a good, simple (read USB), cheaper mic for spaces that aren’t sound proofed very well” – just what I needed. And I’ve never needed anything more.

I’m hoping to improve my video more. I never really wanted my face to be prominent in the video tips, but it’s definitely part of it.

And recently, I got a rude awakening. I started a podcast that also goes on YouTube, and Peter, my first Elixir friend, had an awesome setup. Mine paled in comparison.

When the dead chat with the living

So, I’ve taken some steps already – like realizing that you can change the ring light’s temperature, adjusting the camera’s temperature, improving my light in the background, and actually recording my video in 4k. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s a screenshot of my face in an upcoming tip (video tip 101!):

Better camera settings, warmer light, and proper face alignment

The intro and outro

The first few times I recorded, I didn’t know how to start talking. I said things like “Hey there” or “Good morning”. But nothing felt great.

It’s surprising how weird it feels to stare at a 3…2…1 countdown on your screen and then go directly into speaking like you’ve been talking all along. At least, it’s weird for me.

In any case, after a few videos, I started a video with “hello, hello”. And that seemed okay. Unfortunately, it became a crutch! I can’t start videos anymore without saying “hello, hello”. It’s the cue my brain uses to go into recording mode. 🤦

Fortunately, people seem to like it. It’s even become something of my signature!

People seem to like the 'Hello, hello!'

The one thing I wanted to have was a cool outro. I always remember Avdi Grimm’s “happy hacking!” ending to his videos. And if it weren’t so darn cool, I’d steal it for myself. But nah, I can’t pull that off.

Thankfully, my outro of “I hope you like it” came naturally at some point. And I kinda like it. It even gets people to reply to it sometimes. 😂

I like that people like it

The reception

The Elixir community’s reception to the videos has been great!

I have been amazed at how many people reply saying that they really appreciate the videos, how it helps them, and how they love the format – short and to the point so they can go on with their day.

Some of the YouTube comments I copied to the Elixir Streams website

By far, the coolest comment anybody’s said about my video tips was [Bryan’s tweet]:

Every word is gold. Bryan is a wordsmith

It’s such a nice comment that I made it the top quote on the Elixir Streams website.

The tips also get mentioned frequently in the Thinking Elixir podcast. It’s always such a nice surprise to be listening to the news and hear Mark and David talk about one of the tips!

But the biggest surprise to me came when I attended ElixirConf 2023 and 2024. People started approaching me and saying, “You’re the video guy”, or “I like your videos”, or they just went straight into “hello, hello!”

I guess I'm just the 'Hello! Hello!' guy now. (Hi Dhony!)

I also love when people say the videos have helped them. A few people have reached out in Slack or YouTube over the years to tell me how much they’ve helped them. That’s honestly one of the coolest things.

Isn’t the internet amazing? People from all over the world can create things, share them, and others find them and improve through them!

It’s been a wonderful experience being able to contribute to the community in such a visible way. I’d always been more of a writer (hello blog post!), but people really seem to like the short video format and benefit from it. So, I’m glad the community received them so well.

The metrics

I don’t have a canonical source of metrics. I have YouTube metrics (which are easy to get), the Elixir Streams website metrics (I use Fathom with as little tracking as possible), and Twitter metrics (which are kinda useless).

I’m not exactly sure what counts as a “view” in YouTube shorts. Many of the tips are under a minute, so they automatically get dropped into that bucket. And I imagine many people scroll away pretty quickly. So, who knows if that’s a view or not.

The Elixir Streams website’s metrics should in theory be included in YouTube’s metrics (since that’s where the videos are hosted). So, I imagine the YouTube metrics are the upper bound and the Elixir Streams metrics are the lower bound. But I’m not sure how accurate they are.

First, the website, which is the lower bound.

Fathom analytics for visits to Elixir Streams

Since the creation of the website, the website’s had 30.4k people and 48.6k views. I don’t have anything to compare that number to, but that doesn’t seem bad. If we round to 50k views and we have 100 videos, that’s roughly 500 views per video. That doesn’t count people going in through YouTube, or people seeing the native Twitter videos. Again, just a rough estimate.

YouTube stats are larger. I have one video that isn’t Elixir Streams related, so I filtered that out.

YouTube analytics since I posted first tip

In total, it says the videos had 90.3k views. That’s almost double, and therefore more like 1k views per video. Not bad! YouTube also shows 1.5k hours of watch time. That kinda blows my mind. People have spent over a thousand hours watching my 1-3 min videos.

By the way, if you look closely, you’ll see a spike near the beginning. That’s around December 30th when a blog post I wrote made it to the top of hackernews – the post had the video embedded in it.

Twitter doesn’t have aggregate metrics for all my video posts. I have aggregate metrics for all my tweets, but that’s a lot of noise.

So, instead of showing the aggregate, here’s a sample of a couple of recent posts.

First one on the lower end:

A recent post that wasn't really a hit

It got 1.5k impressions (whatever that means), 15 likes, 1 reply, and 3 reposts.

And here’s a more popular one:

A recent post that did pretty well

The video got 7k impressions, 62 likes, 2 replies, and 7 reposts.

This view of Twitter’s analytics doesn’t show how many bookmarked it, which is a shame. I think that’s a good metric of whether people like the post too.

What’s next?

I’ve considered what I want Elixir Streams to become. But I confess I’m not sure yet.

One one hand, I thought it could be my hub for Elixir tips and courses. I like the idea, but that would mean investing more in courses. I think it could be a good strategy, but I’m unsure if I want to create a ton of courses (they take a lot of time).

I’ve also considered making it a community place where I just curate YouTube videos from the Elixir community. It’s still something I’m considering, but there’s no going back if I announce that. So, I haven’t pulled the trigger with that yet.

Finally, I considered taking sponsorships to help offset the cost (of my time) of recording videos. Maybe I could even make it more of my regular job. But I’m not sure if I want to do that either. Sometimes when I tie things to “need to make money”, they lose the pure joy of creation. And if I do decide to try to make money somehow, I think I’d rather go the courses route.

In the end, it may just remain what is is. A hub for free video tips I create. And hopefully a great resource for the community.

Thank you for watching!

Finally, I’d like to say thank you to all the people who’ve watched the videos!

Without people watching and mentioning how much they like them, I would’ve stopped doing them long ago.

Hope you like ‘em 😉

– German