Hasty Treat - Building Curriculum for Courses

Episode Summary

Executive Summary: Scott and Wes discuss how they design course curricula, contrasting Wes’s structured, research-driven, diagrammed approach with Scott’s faster, iterative monthly production process. They cover topic selection, balancing audience demand with personal expertise, building projects that teach multiple concepts, keeping tutorials current, and the importance of making lessons linear, digestible, and practical.

Main Topics: Choosing course topics: Both hosts emphasize selecting topics based on audience pain points, platform needs, and personal expertise rather than chasing random popular requests. Curriculum design and project selection: Wes explains how he starts from a set of concepts he wants to teach and then invents a project that naturally demonstrates them, aiming for the sweet spot between too simple and too complex. Structuring lessons for video: They discuss transforming non-linear software development into a linear, easy-to-follow course with short videos, bullet points, diagrams, and stepwise progression. Keeping courses current: They stress the challenge of re-recording tutorials as frameworks change, with outdated dependencies or APIs quickly making lessons obsolete. Review, simplification, and correctness: Wes highlights expert review and aggressively simplifying codebases to reduce confusion, avoid support burden, and make the material easier to learn. Different production workflows: Scott describes a rapid monthly production pipeline with limited formal outlining, while Wes uses markdown docs, bullet points, and prebuilt diffs to guide recording. Advice for aspiring tutorial creators: The episode closes with encouragement to start creating even without a perfect plan; quality improves over time through repetition and practice.

Key Arguments: Great course ideas come from listening to what learners struggle with, not just what they explicitly ask for. A course topic should overlap audience demand with the instructor’s genuine interest and expertise. The best tutorial project is one that naturally teaches multiple concepts without becoming overly large or too trivial. Course building requires simplifying the codebase so learners can keep up and not get lost across many files and abstractions. Software tutorials must be kept up to date because small ecosystem changes can invalidate large portions of a course. Expert review helps ensure accuracy and reduces the chance of teaching patterns that will create support problems later. Tutorial creators should start making content before they feel fully ready; skills and quality improve through iteration.

Data Points: Wes’s course count: about 8 courses - Wes says he has made around eight courses plus many short videos. Wes’s React course re-records: 3 times - He says React for Beginners has been re-recorded three times over three and a half years. Re-recording time: 2-3 weeks - Wes says re-recording an entire course takes a couple to three weeks. Scott’s monthly cadence: 1 course every single month - Scott explains his Level Up Tutorials model releases a new course each month. Monthly production window: first 2 weeks planning/recording; next 2 weeks finalizing/producing - Scott outlines his month-long tutorial production workflow. Scott’s episode output: 6 tutorials in one day; 4 the day before - He describes recording speed while working on a React testing series. Scott’s recorded progress: 10 videos deep - He says he is already ten videos into the month’s pro series. Typical series length target: 20-30 videos - Scott says that is his sweet spot for a tutorial series. Polyglot support example: PHP backend + Angular frontend - Used as an example of Sentry supporting many platforms/languages. Resolution improvement claim: 5 hours to 5 minutes - A Sentry marketing claim Scott repeats about reducing error resolution time. Support credit: 2 months free - Syntax listeners get two months free with the code TASTYTREAT. Sentry language support claim: pretty much any language - Scott describes Sentry as supporting nearly any language.

Pivotal Quotes: "how do you build curriculum?" — Scott: Introduces the main topic of the episode: course design workflow and decision-making. "Nobody asked for, I would really love 30 days of building things with vanilla JavaScript." — Wes: Explains that course ideas should solve underlying learner pain points rather than literal requests. "just do it. Like, just start making some stuff." — Scott: Advice to aspiring tutorial creators to begin producing even without a perfect plan.

Implications: Tutorial creators should prioritize learner pain points, clear structure, and freshness over perfection. For the industry, fast-changing tools make maintenance and expert review essential to keep education reliable and relevant.