There are SO MANY resources to learn about BC and AL development out there. Some of the best of them are totally For Freeeee!! As I always like to point out: free is in everybody’s budget. Today I noticed a video that popped up in my YouTube timeline. It was a video that I had recorded a few years ago, and I noticed that it had more than 30K views! Just an unreal number, and I want to share the story about these videos.
It Starts…
Back in 2018 I was one of the owners of a well-known company (I’m gonna keep the name out of this post for personal reasons). We were working closely with Microsoft on the cutting edge of all the new technologies. We had developed the material for a number of workshops, and we all traveled to a bunch of different places all over the world to teach NAV people the intricacies of the new technology stack, new processes in the channel, and the philosophy that would become the path that we are now all traveling. Chances are that if you attended any event that was organized or sponsored by Microsoft, you have attended one of our workshops.
At some point, we were stretched quite thin. There were more requests for these workshops than we had staff to hold them. Microsoft then came up with the brilliant idea to record our workshops and create a series of videos that would be made available on PartnerSource.
Creating Content
We created a Very. Long. List. of topics, and the word came in from Microsoft: start creating content! The task of actually creating the videos fell to me, because of my demeaner during in-person classes and my pleasant baritone voice *ahem*. The truth is that most of my co-owners thought this would be a terribly tedious task, and I was the only one that was actually excited to record all of this material. Also, I had a LOT to learn and this was a perfect opportunity to do just that. As far as I’m concerned, this was by far the coolest project I had ever taken on in my professional career. It was explained to me that Microsoft would provide the content, and all that I had to do was record the videos.
It would take a whole series of posts to tell the stories of creating the content, so let me just summarize. Despite assurances from one of my co-owners, nobody at Microsoft knew about the expectation that they would provide ANY sort of content, other than meeting with me to briefly discuss the outline of the content and providing answers to questions. For a number of topics we had some content from short presentations at various events, but none of it was nearly good enough to make it into the videos. As it turned out, I had to create most of the material from scratch. A LOT of willing and eager Microsoft people spent a very limited time with me to first explain the basics and then go over the results of my material before I recorded it.
Let me just make one thing very clear. I enjoyed every single minute of the process of creating and recording the material. It was an absolute joy to work with every single person from the BC team, many of whom had to endure completely ignorant questions from me. I am super grateful to have had the opportunity to work with each and every one of them. I could not have done any of this without their help.
Over the course of 6-7 months, I created more than 20 hours of videos. The topics range from a condensed version of our 2-day AL Development workshop, to videos about how to get your app into AppSource, to automated testing, to source code management. Picked up a bunch of skills that I still benefit from today. It really was one of the best projects of my career.
The Academy That Never Was
The initial idea was that Microsoft would create some sort of ‘academy’ that would be accessible in PartnerSource. Partners would pay a fee for to provide training to their staff, of which our company would receive a percentage. All good with us, because there were BIG plans for the ISV Development Center, so we didn’t think we would have much more time to do in-person workshops anymore anyway.
Soon it became clear that this academy was not going to happen. There were calls from partners that they would not want to pay for this, since they never had to pay to attend any in-person events. At some point about half the videos were done, most of the material for the rest was ready to record, and the question was to continue recording or to stop the project.
There was talk of putting the videos on PartnerSource but not behind a paywall, which just made no sense to me at all. Most developers that I know don’t even have access to PartnerSource, so they would never even see it. Besides, if you are going to provide this content for free, why not just put all of it on YouTube? Just upload it to the public and let anyone that wants to learn all the skills that you need to make it as an AL developer. Once I heard that the content was going to be made available for free, I went all in and talked to anyone that wanted to listen that it should be made available publicly.
To make a long story short, they did end up putting the videos on YouTube (they are all in a single playlist that you can access here).
Unexpected Impact
It’s been almost four years since I created these videos. Still today, every once in a while, videos from this playlist show up in my YouTube timeline, like today. It just struck me that this video had 30K (thirty THOUSAND!!!) views. I was just so surprised about how many people have watched videos that I created. Thinking about all the people that have learned these skills, partly as a result of listening to me explain them. It just makes my head spin.
There are two things about these videos that I take full credit for. First, since I was responsible for the content, I had decided that I wanted to make proper full-length videos. Not condensed summary videos with the high level view of the topic, but deep down detailed videos with ALL the information that you need to execute on that topic.
The second thing is getting the content into YouTube. The project manager told me that my relentless lobbying to every person in the BC team was a key factor in getting them to put these videos on YouTube. I was paid to create the videos but getting them to YouTube was totally done with a community spirit. This is by far the most impactful contribution I have ever made to the BC community, one that I am extremely proud of.