I'd like to introduce you to SysCast, a new online resource for learning about Open Source projects and Linux through screencasts.
I’m excited to announce a teaser for an upcoming new project I’ve been working on for the last several months. While it isn’t finished yet, I’m just about ready to start a closed beta program with a limited number of testers.
What is it?
If you’re familiar with any of these websites, SysCast is a healthy mix between Laracasts, Servers for Hackers, Udemy and Linux Academy.
The concept is relatively simple: if you want to learn about Nginx, follow a screencasting course. Everything you need to know is explained in “video series”, spanning multiple episodes. Each episode talks you through, in detail, about a specific topic.
In the case of Nginx for example, the episodes span the installation & basic configuration, how proxy’ing works, what the different configuration parameters mean, …
But instead of boring blogposts where you just skip straight to the configurations to copy/paste (like this blog, for example), you’ll learn the impact of each individual parameter.
Each episode will have specific and to-the-point examples on why each parameter is needed and which purpose it serves.
Right now, we’re working on series on The HTTP Protocol, Varnish 4, Config Management with Puppet, Basic Linux training, Apache configurations, HTTP/2 Explained, ….
We’ll cover the most popular open source projects first and move on to more complex configurations like Elastic Search, Kibana, Ansible, … So much to share!
Sounds like a lot of work, is this going to be free?
Well, it is a lot of work. And no, not everything will be free. I plan to offer a monthly subscription fee where you get unlimited access to all videos and get notified about new series and episodes being released.
However, not everything will be behind a paywall. In part for publicity and in part because I do enjoy sharing knowledge and content, some series will be free for all. It hasn’t been decided which series those are going to be, though.
Time will tell.
What does it look like?
It’s an early prototype (but functional!), but here are some teasers – if you’re into that sort of thing.
The homepage
The listing of all series
The listing of episodes in a specific series
The detail page of a single screencast, with video
Coolio, sign me up!
Well, I hope you’re as excited as I am. :-)
I’ll be looking for beta testers in the next couple of weeks, so if you’d like to give SysCast a try, sign up for the beta program at SysCa.st!
For other news, you can follow the Twitter account at @SysCast_Online. We’ll post the configurations used in each video on Github too, so you can follow the SysCast organisation there, too.
Any feedback is appreciated! Perhaps especially the negative criticisme, so I can finetune (or abort altogether) the project where needed.