Bite-size video tutorials for badass web developers.

egghead

This is the video companion to the [egghead.io Instructor Guide](https://howtoegghead.com/instructor/).

Screencasting is hard! There are virtually infinite ways to produce one. For an egghead.io lesson we expect several key aspects to be met. We want to make sure that our lessons have depth and clarity. Clarity is important and starts with the technical aspects of recording your screen and voice. Once we have achieved this objective level of clarity, we dip into the stylistic aspects of recording a lesson. The style is subjective, and the goal of an egghead.io lesson is not to have an army of uniform drone producing flavorless video content for the masses.

Our mission is to make you a badass screencaster. We want to push you to another level. We've found that a small set of standard practices will create an awesome experience for the student, and eliminate frustration as we teach by providing a repeatable pattern for success. It’s not complicated. In fact, it is simple, but it isn’t easy.


This course will show you how to produce an egghead.io lesson. We strive for consistency in style, and these lessons will demonstrate the core elements that create our brand screencasts. Let’s learn how together.

Before recording your first lesson, pick a title that accurately reflects what you plan on teaching. Use the "How do I..." trick to properly frame your lesson and title. "How do I dig a hole with a spoon?" would be answered with a lesson titled "Dig a Hole with a Spoon." Or "How do I eat a lobster with chopsticks?" would be answered with a lesson titled "Eat a Lobster with Chopsticks." 

Pick a Lesson Title

Teaching an egghead lesson should feel like walking the audience through a set of instructions. Do this, then that, move that, twist this, finally push that. The audience wants to see you putting the code together. Assembling your demo while they watch makes it feel much more real and achievable.

Teach Step-by-Step

Code is usually pretty good at explaining itself. So it's best to just start writing code while you talking about it, then see if any additional explanation is required. When you fall into the trap of a long-winded explanation before you begin coding, you risk confusing the audience or unnecessarily repeating yourself.

Show First, then Maybe Explain

Any extra information on the screen will easily distract the audience from the purpose of your lesson. Do your best to remove any extra notifications, UI, or other information that would take away from what you're teaching.

Remove Distractions

Any information you would want to put into an Intro or Outro belongs in the accompanying description, title, course page, etc. The lesson is only for showing the process. Talking about yourself, the lesson, or other lessons is a waste of time.

Avoid Intros and Outros

Tangents are opportunities for other lessons. When you find yourself drifting off-topic because you feel you _need_ to explain  some code you wrote, consider how that piece of code fits back into a "How do I?" question, then come up with a separate lesson to capture it.

Stay on Topic

Video is a one-way form of communication, so user's don't have the chance to ask you to clarify or ask "Where does X fit in?" This places the burden on you to guide their eyes as you explain how all the little pieces of the code fit together. When your application has a "flow", "X triggers Y, Y triggers Z", make sure to "show the flow" by walking them through where each chunk of code fits. This involves a lot of mouse movement (or fancy keyboard selection shortcuts) and hightlighting to bring it all together.

Guide Their Eyes

Forgetting to change your resolution or setting up your mic will result in an unusable lesson. So please, please, please, set your resolution to 1280x720 (HiDPI), set your mic input to "Onyx Blackjack", and confirm that your mic loud enough (it helps to put your mouth as close to the mic as possible).

Prepare to Record - Screen Resolution and Mic Check

Recording can be intimidating, so it's best to just hit the record button and start talking. Take it one thought at a time. Sit quietly, think about what you're going to say/type, then do it. If you mess, up, undo back to when you were quiet and try again. Once you get a good take, move on to the next thought. The ideal raw recording is a ton of bad takes and one good take for each thought. So when you get to the editing phase, you quickly clear out the bad takes and leave the good ones.

Record One Thought at a Time

Editing a raw lesson video is a very simple process. You simply watch your own lesson and edit out all the bad takes and dead space using the "Ripple Delete" command. You will be left with a nice, cut lesson ready to export and upload.

Edit with Ripple Delete

When making your font sizes large, your code will often get to long to fit on the screen. This lesson shows you how to use "word wrap" or "prettier print width" to adjust your code to fit within the editor.

Record Badass Screencasts for egghead.io

John Lindquist

Free Community Resource

Free Community Resource

Course Content