In May 2020, I hosted a live session asking, "What would you like to see in video tutorials about developing interfaces with Xamarin.Forms?" So, what happened to that initiative? That's what you'll find out in this post.

During and after the live session, I took note of all the suggested ideas and organized them on a GitHub board. Many ideas were submitted, and I want to thank everyone for their participation. After organizing everything, I started producing the content, but I had not yet publicly shared the results of the work.

During the content production, I found someone interested in the project who started contributing as well because making videos is quite a lot of work! I’m talking about Pedro Jesus, a colleague and someone enthusiastic about contributing to open-source projects. Thanks, Jesus! I appreciate your dedication!

New Year, New Goals?

Last week, while evaluating some goals for 2022, I looked at the video tutorial material and thought, “I need to give people feedback on this,” and I made a post on Twitter talking about what happened and the decisions we made.

Alright, but where’s the material?

As mentioned in the tweet, the material is very basic and contains only a small fraction of what we had planned to do. We created a YouTube playlist to group the videos.

What about the future of the video tutorials?

Well, we’re not sure if we’ll continue making the video tutorials. There is still a lot of content to script, prepare examples, record, and edit. This will depend heavily on the feedback we receive on the content created so far. Making videos is a time-consuming process, especially for someone like me without much experience. Several hours of dedication were required to create the videos, even though they are short. So, I’ve been thinking about other ways to contribute.

Lessons Learned

At first, I had the feeling that the project failed because it’s been 1 year and 7 months, and the video tutorials are still not complete. But after some discussions, I began to look at the bright side: there’s a lesson in everything we do. In this case, the lesson is: There’s no point in planning something super complete and complex if we take too long to deliver value. Feedback from people is the most valuable aspect in deciding whether something should continue or not, and even if it needs to be adapted.

That’s why we decided to release all the material to get your feedback. Feel free to comment on the post or directly on the videos. Every opinion matters.

Best regards!