What I Realized After A Decade of Content Creation

After 10 years of creating tech ed content, recording hundreds of videos and publishing nearly 20 courses, I just realized that I'm no longer a content creator. But I am not going anywhere. Let me explain. A newsletter subscriber recently replied back to one of my blast offs and what they said really caught me off track. I think you should stop teaching Adobe Commerce. I was a little taken back, but we replied back and forth and I finally realized what he was asking for was for me to create content a bit above and beyond my normal scope of magento stuff. So earlier this year I did hold a little bit of an experiment. I always wanted to build my own custom course platform but never had the resources or the time to actually set aside and build this myself. I tried hiring someone to help me out but that didn't work out. But then cloud code came out and it completely completely changed the game for me. And since then I've actually built 98% of this custom course platform completely with cloud code being my pair programmer. Now this is a really complex app. It's not just a little to do app or a simple game, but a real production app that has already been shipped to hundreds of my university students and it'll soon scale out to the 15,000 plus currently registered over I Academy. What should have taken me about three years to build actually took me three months now. I did have to learn a lot of this stuff along the way and had some stumbling blocks and figure out all of the nuances with AI, but working with it has confirmed me that AI is not the future of programming and development. It's happening right now. I also realized during this time that I don't want to be a content creator anymore who occasionally codes stuff up on the side. I want to be a builder who shares what he learns. There's a huge difference. Content creators plan out all the content for the year, identify exactly what to teach, then create a plan and schedule out a formalized curriculum. But I want to be a builder who follows my own curiosity and build courses from what I learn and what I discover and actually making real things. For example, I recently migrated this custom course platform for MySQL to Postgres. It uses Laravel behind the scenes and I thought using the eloquent ORM would make this really easy, but there were a ton of nuances along the way with PG Bouncer and pooling modes and things like that and I actually worked with the AI a ton to help me figure out the nuances of what was really going on so I can get this migration stable and make it scalable. Now, if I tried to plan out some new educational content around the idea of MySQL to Postgres database migrations, it wouldn't just hit the same way, right? So instead I documented how I figured this stuff out along the way, then can now form new educational material around the actual process of me building out the real thing. So whenever I find a weird prompt that works oddly well, or find out something that is unexpected or novel, I'll be documenting that and then using that to determine what I teach. So the building drives the teaching, not the other way around. If you've been following me and my Magento courses, you're probably wondering, what does this mean for McAdemy? Well, don't worry at all because everything is staying exactly the same. The courses, the university subscription campus, it's all here and available right now. But I will be adding in a new initiative and that will be my actual journey of building stuff with AI. You're going to start seeing me building real apps and debugging real code and probably struggling on certain things that happen when I work. When I discover something useful, you'll get a lesson. When I hit some walls, I'll be sharing my thought process of working through those issues. And this will probably be a bit raw and unfiltered because we're moving a bit faster now because the AI demands it. I'm doing this because there's one thing I know every developer out there right now needs to learn and understand about AI assisted development, and they need to start right now before it just passes them by. So if you're a developer wondering what's next, wondering how AI can fit into your development workflow, and wondering if any of your skills still even matter, well, they definitely do, now more than ever. But the actual workflow of developing has been stale for some time and AI completely changes this landscape. I'd love for you to join me as I document everything along the way. The wins, the fails, the moments where I am like, holy crap, that worked. So all of the content that you see on social media, including my YouTube channel, LinkedIn X Reddit, it will become more of a builder log of what I work on every day. You can think of this as a little bit less polished and less about theory and more about being pragmatic and shipping real, actual code. If you're still here and excited, please consider following me because we'll be going into some really cool stuff with cloud code and and probably a lot of other AI tools and what those will be? I really don't know, but they'll stem from my real usage and documentation. Along the way. I also recently started a Beyond Vibe Coding with Cloud Code newsletter where I share something new, unique or interesting that I've found out about cloud code or how to ship production apps with AI while still retaining the quality you need as a developer. And I'll share something whenever I stumble onto it, usually about once a week or so. As far as I'm concerned, the content creator chapter of my life is closed and the builder chapter of my life starts right now. So let's start shipping some code. I'll see you in the next build.