Pluralsight Followup

22. June 2014 Uncategorized 0

I heard back from Pluralsight this week. I wasn’t immediately accepted, they want to see a second video from me. I was told there were 3 possible outcomes when auditioning:

  1. Immediate acceptance
  2. Second video
  3. Immediate rejection

Obviously,  I was hoping for the first one. Who doesn’t want immediate acceptance?  But I am glad that it wasn’t an immediate rejection.  The nice part about asking for a second video was they provided very specific feedback. Some of it was things I did good (knowledgable, lots of energy.) Some things were items I needed to work on. For example, a couple portions of the video were unclear. Both from an explanation standpoint, and from a “Your slide looks blurry” standpoint.

It seemed like a lot of the feedback revolved around the quality of my video, and provided specific ways to make it better. For example, they suggest using a larger font when recording, rather than zooming in on the video after the fact.

For my second video, I had two choices. Either take their comments and re-cut my video addressing those issues, or create a brand new video. I chose the latter. My main reason was, I felt like a couple areas they pointed out as being unclear would be hard to clean up and still keep it to 10 minutes. That is, I thought perhaps my first topic was just a bit too large. It’s probably a 15 minute talk instead of a 10 minute talk.

So I’m working on my second video. It’s related to the first, in that it deals with TDD & JavaScript, but it doesn’t try to cover as much.  I’ve already learned some lessons from the first go round. For example, so far, all I’ve done is record video. I didn’t even turn the mic on when recording. I still talked through it as I went, to get a rough approximation of how long I would spend on that slide.

I’ve watched the video a couple times to make sure I had all the video I need before recording audio. What I learned last time was recording audio multiple times is obvious on the output. You have to play games to make it sound similar. So this time, I’m recording my video, making it have everything I want, and THEN recording the audio.

Also, this time, I’ll use Audacity to record the audio because it seems to have better normalization filters and noise canceling filters than Camtasia.

Once I hear back on my second video, I’ll let you guys know.