I made a baseball bat that uses explosives to add a bunch of energy to your swing and hit a baseball really far. It uses the explosive blanks normally used to shoot nails into concrete (e.g. ramset). It worked way better than I expected, didn't have a kick, and turned out to be just a really neat thing to look at while sipping a frosty beverage. I also made a video about it if you're interested: https://youtu.be/Puo6Vgcbxps
I definitely have a sense of only having one shot so I want to make the best video that I can. Though it’s not so much related to the numbers as it is to:
1) I spend a ton of time on the engineering so I don’t want to make a crappy video that doesn’t do it justice
2) the amount of time spent watching these videos is staggering. Like multiple lifetimes of time is spent watching an average video. If I make a junk video, I’ve just wasted an enormous amount of time. Being a good steward of this weighs heavily on me.
I used to be a full time dev / R&D engineer. Now I basically do the same thing on YouTube (youtube.com/stuffmadehere). The difference now is my R&D-ing is directed at early stage prototypes that I think are interesting / instructive, rather than what is best for an actual business, useful, or profitable.
Youtube is interesting because theres a constant source of numeric feedback on how you are doing (views / subscribers / watch time). Seeing these numbers change based on what you do can be incredibly addicting and it's very easy to accidentally connect your personal happiness to those numbers. This is great if they are going up, but if they aren't.... yeah. It's also easy to get into a situation where you lean into "what works" over and over until you find yourself doing stuff that you don't enjoy.
My advice would be to find a way to keep the numbers at arms length and focus on doing stuff that you enjoy. You definitely need the feedback of stats / comments / etc to get better, but you don't wan to check it 10 times a day. Personally when I launch a video I will check a few times to ensure I didn't screw up anything major, see if there is any useful feedback in comments, then I will check maybe the stats every week or two.
I've found the opposite of this sentiment to be true, at least in my case as youtube engineer / maker. If you can find a way to monetize your hobby it is:
1. A great motivator to actually finish projects
2. A good way to justify / fund more costly projects
3. A great source of joy if people enjoy what you make
I've been careful to not undermine my key sources of joy in making things (learning, doing hard things, making quality things) by keeping monetization at a lower priority to those things. In my opinion if you can find a way to monetize without undermining what you truly enjoy, you can thread the needle between job / hobby and I'd highly recommend it!
What I find amazing is that one thousandth of an inch is not particularly precise when it comes to machining. You can easily make parts to that accuracy with common mills and lathes.
Also surprisingly (to me) is if you have a pin that goes into a hole that is 1-2 thousandths of an inch larger than the pin, it feels like a sloppy loose fit. If you want the pin to feel like a really nice smooth fit you need more like a couple TEN THOUSANDTHS of an inch clearance.
I have both MechE and CS degrees. The big difference I see is that MechE is one course that builds on top of another on and on. Quite a rigorous progression that is hardcore on math and physics. To self teach MechE you have to work yourself through that progression which is a huge commitment.
OTOH what most people consider “CS” is more like “the ability to program”. You can get competent enough to be dangerous with a few classes and side projects.
Note that isn’t actually being competent at CS - that is quite a lot more work which just isn’t needed in practice for a lot of work that needs done.
I’ve found that content quality is much more important than posting consistency. This is because there’s a nonlinear relationship between views & quality. For example a video that is twice as good might be capable of getting 10 times as many views. If that’s true it implies that (within reason) spending more time to make a better video is the best strategy. Intuitively this makes sense: would it be better to make 1 mediocre video every day consistently OR 1 really good video every 1-3 weeks that gets 100x the views.
I’ve heard the argument that YouTube rewards consistency, but I am anything but consistent with my videos [1](every 1-3 months) and I haven’t noticed any negative consequences.
Building and maintaining commercial properties is absurdly expensive. A landlord takes on the cost, risk, and time of building and maintaining that property in exchange for businesses not having to deal with that.
The idea that a landlord should invest serious capital to build a business park and then pay people to use it is nonsense. In that arrangement zero business properties would be made. People who wish to start a business would have to foot the bill to purchase or build a space for their business.