How to Learn Through Content Creation with Raphael de Lio

Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Akil and if you're interested in productivity and learning through content creation, this episode is for you Joining me today, my friend and colleague Rafael De Leo. I love his stories. I'll put all his socials in the description below, check them out. And with that being said, enjoy the episode. Walk me through kind of your your own process then because you've been making videos for

has it been a year? Has it been longer than a year? I've been making videos for three years now. Three years as I started and I think August of 2020, Yeah, somewhere around 2020, yes, same YouTube channel. Same YouTube channel. Perhaps a mistake. Why? Yes, because I I think I told you that before, but I started my YouTube channel talking about life in Portugal towards Brazilian people. Yeah, right. And and then at some point I switch it into talking about technology.

And the channel started in Portuguese to a niche, and I switched to English into a completely different niche, right? So I already had an audience built in that Channel. And then I started talking about something else, and the channel wasn't pure anymore, you see? So YouTube was recommended my technology videos to people who didn't speak English, or maybe didn't speak English, and who weren't actually interested in that topic, Right?

So I. I I found out recently that that's not something good to do with an YouTube channel, you know, But I mean, it's not good for the transition period, but at some point you've transitioned, right? YouTube now knows OK, this is your audience and it recommends you to the right people then. Yeah, yeah, that. That's what I hope and no one knows though. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people say a lot of different things, right, Of how to grow your channel and get to

more subscribers and more views. Yeah. Yes. I've been in the process. In the process of understanding that yeah, I don't think there's a there's a final answer. I deleted because I was making short clips because I saw everyone that did a podcast had like a either a separate channel or on the same channel they will post clips of the podcast episode like good fragments, not shorts because shorts were not there yet. And I started posting these and they did well.

Then I read that YouTube doesn't like it when you have shorter amount length videos and the longer length videos. And I was like, that's exactly what I have. Well shit. So then I deleted all the shorter length videos and I'm like okay. Well fine, we'll just go with a podcast only channel. And then shorts came out and I'm kind of doing shorts still, so I

don't know what works. That's interesting because I also realized that easily podcast channels, they also have like a side channel only for shorter videos, right? So perhaps that's the reason I also thought so, and because I believe that is why I deleted all the short channels. Got it. Makes sense. And initially, even before we started this channel, I was like, should we have a separate channel for all the little

clips? And then Martin, the guy I started it with, he was like, Nah, it's not worth it and blah blah, blah, Why would we do a separate channel? And I was like, but I did the research, but like, I can't prove anything. It's just it's my thoughts, right? And no one's gonna tell you, OK, this is right or wrong, It's just whatever you think is best based on what other people are doing. It's very strange. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That that. That's funny, right? That's the thing about advice. And I mean everybody's got a an advice, right. And I think I think it's dangerous, right? If I if I come to you for example and say you shouldn't do that on your channel and I'm not 100% sure of what I'm saying, this is dangerous because it may be leading you into the wrong direction, right. And recently I started a a channel about Stoicism as I as I told you before. And my mom and I've been posting

every day, right? And my mom come recently to me and said, hey, you shouldn't post every day, should post most a week so people can miss it and come back. And that was like, yeah, but you're you're saying that based on what? Yeah. And she said, oh, based on marketing courses that I did online. And I was like, OK, OK. But you see, she she, she can't be 100% sure about that. That's her feeling, right. And her intuition.

But it may be dangerous. If you're for telling somebody that and you're leading the person towards the wrong direction, yeah, Even though you have a good intention, right? If you give advice to someone, do you do it like that? Like it's absolute, like it's black and white? Because I don't and I very consciously do it because I don't want to be wrong. So whenever I am not sure, I say I think this is so and so and then people like, OK, this is what he thinks. Well, whatever.

I never say OK, this is how it is. Because if I'm not sure, I don't want to come across as if it's 100% for other people then to interpret and be like no, I did this, you were wrong, blah blah blah, these consequences. So I always am very conscious with what I say and when, it's just what I think is the truth. And if you then think the same thing, fine, If you don't, fine as well. It's my opinion, basically. Yeah, no, I totally, I totally

agree with you. And I think I even take a step further that is, I doubt myself seeing what I believe in. Sometimes you're in a situation that you're like, there is somebody. Doing something wrong for me, right or towards me. And then I stopped for a second and I think, Is that true? What I believe to be true is true. Is this the reality? Or is this my interpretation of the reality you see and I try to

take evidence from? The thing air right to understand if if that's actually true or not. And I talk and I talk to people that I trust, like my wife for example. I talk to her about the situation so I can understand it better and understand if what I'm actually believing to be true is true. You see, before I take any actions on to solve the situation or just to to make it better, you see, I think that's really good because it, first of all, it probably grounds you and

you're not judgmental, right? I some of my friends do this when they see something and they say that's weird and I'm like, why is it weird, right? That's just your opinion. Why do you label it as something that is odd just because you think that is so right? You're not in their context, you don't know what they've been through or what is happening right now, why they're behaving the way they are.

And I feel like, I mean, maybe that's not why I say that's interesting way too much, but don't like it when people say that's weird. I feel like just allow people to do whatever they do, right? There's probably a reason why they're doing it. If not, then that could be a reason in and of themselves as well. Yeah, yeah, it's different. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that whenever we're judging some something or somebody, we're actually projecting ourselves into it,

right? Something that we don't like sometimes about ourselves or we're afraid of or anything else into it, right. Yeah, I think that's the that's what happens. Yeah, it could be.

Yeah. I think that's interesting as well. Walk me through when you actually started this YouTube channel because you had the idea you just want to talk to people or what was the idea there? I I didn't want to start a YouTube channel. Actually it was my brother's idea. He he always came with ideas for us to make money. Yeah, right. So when it started working, when I started working because I'm, I'm younger than him and he said hey, we should open a mini franchise you see.

So. You got to start working. You're going to save this amount of money and then we're going to take this amount of money and open the mini franchise. And I thought, wow, that's nice, let's do it. So I would have to work in the for two years and so I could save that amount of money so I could open the mini franchise in the shopping mall, for example, so we could make more money. And it never happened. I started saving money on, but I I never opened the mini franchise, right.

And the ideas would come. And then he started getting interested in in buying stocks and then he talked me into it as

well. So. It was around 2014 right and Brazil had just gone through a political crisis at the time our president had just been featured the that the stock market was was crashing and bonds president bonds they were paying more because of the because of the government's fragility and at this time you could buy these bonds and and earn a lot of money and you could buy stocks for example as well and almost any stock that it would buy.

If it didn't went bankrupt, so you got to just got to pick them based on that. But but if they if they didn't go bankrupt, they would come back eventually and you would make money. So he started suggesting that I did this and I started doing this and I started liking it, you see. But The thing is I talked to people and at the time I didn't have the mindset that I have today and they would try to talk people into doing that as well like oh you got to do it. This is the right thing to do.

You got to buy stocks and everything else. And I think that some people that I knew at the time and that I still know they they they believe that I'm like a stock investor and I know what I'm doing. But at the time it didn't. I was just lucky that that I that I own border the stock market that had a really nice period. Everything was very cheap and and it went up basically naturally.

You see, the companies would recover eventually because it was like more of a political crisis than the company healthy itself. Yeah, yeah.

Did your brother get you into a lot of things? Because this YouTube channel is one thing, stocks is a is another thing. I think a brotherly influence can do a lot of things. Yeah, yeah. He's been my example for. Yeah, for a long time. Yes, as I really admire him. And yes, we have our our arguments, but yeah, and and disagreements, but. He's he's been my my example for for a long time. I like that a lot. I'm trying to. I mean I wouldn't say I'm I'm that much of an influence.

But yeah, obviously I tell my little brothers a lot, my siblings all the time. Yeah.

And then you suck with this YouTube channel and at some point you decided to pivot, right, pivot into something completely different. I mean you even switch languages. Why? Why the pivot there? Yeah. So I I was selling, but I didn't get there, right. And then? In 2020, my brother started saying, hey, you know, you're living in Portugal because I was

living in Portugal at the time. There are a lot of Brazilian people who are making channels on about their life abroad and they're trending and you can make money out of that right, by by talking and people visualizing your, your videos. It's all right. That's an idea. And at the time, he also said that he was going to start a channel talking about investments and everything else. And I thought, okay, let's do it right. So I'm going to do it about Portugal going to do it about

investments. And I started my channel. He never started. He's one of those brothers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but. But he started talking about it like online and Instagram and other places. But I I started talking about Portugal, right? But it was kind of his idea, actually. So I started talking about how I got my first job in Portugal, how I got my first tech job in Portugal. I started interviewing my former boss and it was just when COVID

hit. So I was interviewing, asking how the market was for Brazilian people who wanted to emigrate from Brazil to Portugal and. If they should do that now or if they shouldn't. And I did other two videos and those other two videos, they were in the list format which work very well on YouTube. So the first one was 10 differences between the traffic like car traffic and Portugal and Brazil, and 10 and five things why I love living in Portugal and those two. Blew up, they they blew up,

yeah. So I got 5000 views like one month for the first one and 10,000 views for the other. Good stuff. Good stuff, yes. And then I realized, shit, I don't want to do it. No, Yeah, it's that one when I actually blew up. Yeah. Not, not, not because it blew up, but I realized that I wasn't doing for myself. You see, I didn't really want to talk about it. I was just trying to surf a wave and yeah, profit on that basically. And but I realized that that wasn't what I wanted to talk about.

That's. It wasn't the legacy that I wanted to leave to the world. Yeah, you see, And that's when I said I got to switch it to something else. I'm going to start making videos about technology and what I'm working with physically because at this point it was already 2021. I had like a hiatus from my from my channel. I didn't post that much and but I was posting a medium because I also have a medium page and.

I was posting articles about things that I worked with, so I was working with the elastic search for example. I had to deploy it on Kubernetes and there weren't many articles explaining how to do that online right? So I wrote my own article and they went pretty well to see how to deploy log stash and Kubernetes as well like this one got I think 90,000 views already. And paid me more than $120.00. Just this article. Yes. And this is not just good, this is motivational, right? Yeah, yeah.

It motivated me to keep doing that. And then I kept, I kept writing on on Medium and I I try to write like every month, sometimes twice a month about things that I was working with. See. Of course, nothing confidential about the company, but like the technology, how to get started, how to do it. I had a problem. I had to. You know dynamic schedulers, for example, in Spring Boot. How can I do it? Yeah, I couldn't find anything online. I had to figure it out myself.

OK, other people are going to be looking for that as well, right? So I'm going to write about it and let them find out. And they do, yeah, yeah, good stuff, man.

Do you like? Because user channel is different than writing content, right? Do you like one more than the other, or do you like it all? That's a tough question. Yeah. You see because. I like writing articles more than making videos, and I will emphasize that writing, then making right the process is easier. When you're writing right, you get the time, You type it, you you press the backspace, you delete it, you review it several times. You don't have to memorize

anything. You just you're writing there, right? That's fine. And you're making videos. It takes time. As you do a shot, you do 234. And you see you're you're trying to record for 10 hours. Sometimes you see at the beginning, at least now I take like sometimes two or three hours and sometimes even less. But it takes time. You see and you're editing after and you're like, I didn't really like that part. I'm like, but I'm not going to record that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so that part I prefer like writing. But on the other hand, I think that the rewards from the videos are. Are bigger. OK. See that the audience that grows around it, the way people see you as I think that that's completely different. I never thought of that, that the audience side of things and kind of the the exposure and the

feedback you get is different because that there's not, are there comments? There's still comments on like Medium blog posts and stuff like that, no, but they, I don't think the audience is as engaging in like your next

article or something. Yeah man, that's was something that was reflecting about recently because in media we have claps that are like likes, you can follow the person, you can subscribe to their channel, you can use the referral code code to become a member and they get part of the of your membership that you pay and you have the comments section as well. But man, people are so miserable. What do you mean? I mean that I get like 50,000 views in the post, right?

People go there. They benefit from it because they're looking for a solution. They're looking for an answer. They find their answer, but they don't clap. They don't subscribe. They don't do anything. You see, They just go there, get what they need and close the tab. So if you're watching this and you and you and you frequently open medium, don't forget to clap and subscribe to people. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I I never do that. I never clap. I never subscribe.

It's because if I'm in my, let's say I'm in a day-to-day right and I need to figure out this problem. I just want to get the information, get back to whatever I was I was doing, right? If you go out of it and if you're like who is this person, what are they doing? Blah blah, blah, like you're out of the problem you were trying to solve. You get you need to retain that focus and otherwise you need to recontextualize completely, which is going to take away from

time, right? Yeah, nowadays I barely even Google because we have this Slack GPT plugin, the ChatGPT plugin from our company. It's hilarious. I just open up Slack. I'm like, I'm trying to do this and convert this to hex and then I need to flip all this and this is the output example. How do I do that? And he just writes me the code. I'm like, yeah, get back to don't need to go any Googling, don't need to click through articles, no nothing. Yeah, yeah, so and with YouTube,

I'm in YouTube mode, right? I'm watching content. I'm like video next video ah, what about is there more like these? I'm all I'm consuming contents, a different vibe, I feel like. So then I do like and subscribe and yeah, not if they tell me, because I hate it when people tell me. That's also why I stopped doing

it on this podcast. OK, I hate it when people tell me so. So if people tell you to subscribe or like it, you say no, I'm not going to do it just because, you know, you told me to do it. It's not a principal thing. I just, I'm like, I didn't need to hear that. It's like I wasted my time. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah. But you know that I follow some people who are kind of experts on making channels. They make a lot of money out of

channels. And some of them they say that having a CTA actually increases the conversion rate of subscribers and people. So yes, I think it also depends on the niche. But I have a lot of friends who tell me like hey, don't do it, don't ask people to do it. And I I kind of stopped. I I just sometimes I reminder in the beginning, at the OR the end, but that's it. But I don't. I don't push, you see, and even though I was talking about people like clapping or

subscribing or following you in this medium for example, but I I don't mind if they don't, you see. Or at least they didn't because right now, until then, I would still get paid, right? So if you pay Medium and you read my content, I get paid for the time that you spend reading my content, right? So it doesn't matter if you clapped or if you followed or anything like that, but Medium is changing their monetization. Policies, OK.

In August, really saying now that the time people spend reading our articles and and the number of claps and the number of subscribers and number of comments are all going to influence the monetization of your of your articles. That's some bullshit. And now I'm like, damn, I'm in in the niche that people don't do it. Yeah, and sometimes like I have this article on that is. Spinning up a Redis instance on docker, for example, see and the

article is nice. You can spin up your docker instance, you can learn how to enable persistence, and you can get really sorry your your Redis instance and you can get ready with with Redis, right? You can get started with the Redis, that's what I mean. And but most people, they just want the docker command, yeah, So they open it, they get the docker command and they go away. Yeah, few seconds. Yes, few seconds. And as developers that's what we

do with most articles, right? You don't want to read the whole content. You just want to get something very specifically very quickly and get out of there. You want to go back to your coding, right? So I'm not really sure how this is going to work out now for developers or people who write content for technology. In that sense, in Medium, it's still going to be a nice platform for month for monetization. It's weird, right, Because the decision hurts the people that

create the content. And then you're like, OK, probably meet and pay way too much and they're trying to budget cut or whatever. So this is the new model, and it's going to hurt. YouTube had that as well. Like I've been on YouTube not making videos but consuming content when it looked so ugly, when it had like the five great star system instead of the thumbs ups, thumbs down, like it

looked like ass. And then also throughout that I've heard content creators talk about YouTube changing their monetization policy, blah blah blah blah. I feel like medium's going through the same thing and either they get better because of it because YouTube's still around. The monetization is fine, I think. I don't know exactly what changed. Content creators are still getting paid. There's still a lot of content

on there. It's bigger than ever, so I don't know how medium's gonna fare in this way.

But yeah, for especially for the tech sector, just get in, get whatever you need, and people are usually out. Yeah, Substack's doing really well though, like tech newsletters and stuff. I feel like that's up and coming, which is really cool as well, that people consistently put out content that people wanna consume on like a weekly basis and people subscribe specifically for kind of all

round content. It's not necessarily to solve a problem, it's more to gain a perspective and an understanding, which I think is different. Got it. But in which sense? I mean, like understanding how an architecture is? Yeah. Or more like news about like these are the new features of this technology or this website was hacked, That's how it happened.

It could be anything. I feel like like it could be OK when when to use microservices or how Uber migrated from X to Y to Z. The layoffs are happening now. Here's a perspective of one of the people that are still there or one of the people that got laid off. Like it's more so about indeed decisions you would have to make and not necessarily kind of how you solve problems. This is more so kind of a paradigm or a perspective or a mindset. Yeah, which different type of

content. I feel like if you're there, like, OK, we're going to use Docker. Like that's already a tool and we have to have these commands. And this is how you spin this up. This is really like a step by step on how to execute something. And once people have that, they're like, get got it done. If it doesn't work, articles wrong. Next article. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

And this is more so like, I feel like more story in a different way, in a different format, but taking people with them, telling a story and then giving a certain sense of a take away here and there, I feel like it's different. People come back for that as well. Yeah, yeah, I I've written both types, right? So for the company I was working for before, I also wrote stories of how we solved the problem. For example, monitoring problem, observability problem for example.

And from what I realized is that this is you post it, you get like a peek, right? People come, they read it and they they disappear because they're not constantly searching for that. Right, But if you have something that is solving a problem, people are constantly searching for that. Yeah. So for example, this article that I have on how to deploy logstash on kubernets. I posted it three years ago and

it still gets a lot of views. Yeah, yes, that's because people are still, they still need to do it, right? They still need to solve this problem. They're constantly. Looking for it? Yeah, yeah. Those people don't clap. That's the thing. Man, those people don't clap. Yeah. Yeah, you're listening to it, right. Yeah, those those people don't clap. But they don't. They come, they come there for the problem. That's it. They get the problem. They go back to whatever they're doing.

And I'm one of them. Like, you're gonna keep looking at the. I'm one of them as well, yeah. Yeah, me too, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we can help it. I mean, we're working. We're like focused, as you said we went to. To stay focused, you just want to solve the problem as fast as possible, yeah? And get back to YouTube, right? Yeah, absolutely.

How did you get so much into Redis? Because I feel like I checked out YouTube channel. A lot of it has to do with Redis. Yeah, even the blog that you said was about Redis as well. Yeah, it was kind of your intro there. Yeah, so you see I hadn't I had never worked with Redis actually OK, I have never worked with the Redis, OK actually. And last year I had this colleague and he said hey. It's going to be a conference in Barcelona, the Springdale

conference. I think we should go, let's talk to our management team and ask them to sponsor us and then we can go there and they said, all right, let's do it right. And at the time the company I was working for, we were struggling with data pipelines, right batch processing on taking too long to process the the data. And I went to this, to this conference with this colleague and there was this stand there of Redis. They were there. They were one of the sponsors.

During this year of the conference and I started talking to them there, just like chatting, you see. And then I started finding out about all the capabilities of Redis that I didn't know until then. And for me, Redis was just a cache. And then I found out that it's much more than that. You see it's a graph database, it's a pub sub kill, it's a stream processor as well. It's a lot of things. And it's an actual database that can be used as a primary

database, you see. And it's super fast as well. That's what they said, right? So since it runs in memory, you can run like millions of operations in one millisecond, so it should be super fast as well. And I said all right, this is perfect. This could even. Perhaps solve our problems at the company I'm working for right now. And I got more interested in that.

And then there was the sales, the saleswoman there, and she said, oh, you should watch the presentation of this guy, Brian Simbaden. That's going to happen by the end of the day. He's like the best. And you should go there and watch. It's all right. You're going to watch it, right? And I I went there. I watched it and it blew my mind, you see, because then he started saying everything that I

already already mentioned here. And he's the the person responsible for maintaining and not maintaining but implementing actually the Redis OM Spring library which is an extension of Spring Redis Data that adds more functions and and capabilities to Spring Data Redis. And his talk was about it right

and it blew my mind. I thought okay I should Start learning about it, but at the same time I read a book. By Austin Clay. I'm not sure if that's how you pronounce his name called Show Your Work. And in that book he basically talk, try, try to talk people into sharing, showing their work. You've seen a sense that you're building something, share some, share a little thing every day you see. And then he has many ways of doing that. And one of the ways is. Share what you're learning as

well. So make it like a learning journey. And I said okay, that's perfect. I want to learn about Redis. I'm going to make it a learning journey. And the reason why he says that. And that's good. If you want to start like sharing content, this is because you feel a lot of pressure, right? You're going to start talking about Spring Boot and you feel like, man, I don't know enough, even though you may know a lot. You see you, you, you feel this imposter syndrome and you're like.

And I shouldn't talk about it because I'm not 100% sure about what I'm saying, right? And if you go through the learning path, through the learning journey, you're actually telling people, hey, I don't know anything about it, I'm going to learn about it. This is my journey. Come learn with me. And that's what I did with Redis. Yeah, So I started to write from the beginning. The first article that I wrote was 10 Things You Didn't Know about Redis.

And I asked Brian to review it. I talked to him on Twitter and and we started talking there, asked him to review it. He he reviewed, he made a a couple of suggestions. I applied the suggestions and they posted was nice and after that I started learning other things as well. So the first thing was Okay, how to run Redis on docker and then how to get started with transactions, how to get started with pub, sub and eventually. I I I mean, I kept creating

content. Yeah, you asked one question and I I talked for no worries. I was thinking because if I

think about myself right, if I pick up a new technology I've never used, I've never done anything with A to BS cloud, right. I've talked a lot about Lambda. I've guests on the talk and know a lot about that and I can challenge questions and I can try to figure out and understand and learn on the moment. But putting out content in my learning journey, that's kind of a weird way of exposing yourself. I feel like like I'm not nervous of the podcast, right? I don't really care how people

perceive me on here. But my idea of me talking to a camera trying to explain this thing, which I don't really understand that well, that kind of frightens me. It didn't frighten you in the beginning at all. Not at all, actually. It was a relief really, see, because I felt that way when it was talking about. Things that I should know about or that I knew about. Yeah, right. But then you're telling people, hey, I don't know anything about it, It's like can be more clear.

Yes, exactly. Like follow on their own responsibility. I don't take any responsibility for that. That's basically what you're saying, right. And sometimes you're going to say something wrong. And I did, yeah. So I I was talking about the rights transactions for example, and I said something wrong and people came in the comments section and they said hey, this is not right, this is not. How it is? This is actually how it is. Yeah, and I went there and deleted the comment.

No, this not on my watch. No, no, no, just kidding. I went there and said, hey, thank you. I'm gonna actually fix your, your comment on the top section of the the comment section so people can actually learn from that. And you thank the person because this is actually aggregating to your learning journey. Yeah, because I didn't know about it and now he told me about it and now I know about it, right. Yeah. So I learn faster. I think so. I think so, yes.

For me, I mean for me at least you see because I I like to see results, that's the thing. And then if I if I I'm doing a course, it takes like 4 weeks and I'm just consuming, consuming, consuming and not producing anything or producing to myself like I'm I don't feel productive. You see I got to put something out in the world, that's the thing. And then if I put something out in the world, I feel motivated to come back and learn more and put something, more things into the world again.

Is that not how you learn? Like, has it kind of shifted your learning paradigm when you pick up a new tool? Would you write A blog post about it? Would you make a video? Like, do you try and put stuff out there to kind of accelerate that? Completely. Completely. Yeah, I was doing that actually. Now I'm trying to focus more on

the niche, right? So I was focusing on Redis and now I my plan is to start focusing on coddling and flutter the technologies that I'm very interested in so before. I would do that. I I was working with the elastic search. I was going to talk about it. I was working with reddies. I was going to talk about it right. Right now I'm going to talk about one specific thing and try to create content about around that and try to create an audience around around that.

Because sometimes like you're talking about reddies and then some people follow you. You're growing an audience around that. And then you start talking about, I don't know, my sequel and then other people are going to follow you. But then you you post a new a new video about reddies, the people who are. Who came to you from my sequel? They're actually not interested in Redis, so they're not going to watch it. Yeah. See. So you're not growing an artist, you're just growing people

around you. Yeah, You see that? That's my feeling. I'm not sure if that's right. Interesting. I I think people also, and this is probably why I'm saying also because people still find you through Redis and they're like, OK, I get the video, I get the content, that's it. And if you create a different video, I don't really care about that.

But we'll still also follow you. I feel like if you might like, shift kind of the paradigm there and talk about the problems that you solve rather than the technologies that you use, the problems that you solve will also kind of shine light on the technologies that you use. But it's a different, it's a different intro to what problem you're solving, right, or what content people are getting. Which I think might help there, because then you can keep the same audiences.

They're all interested in problem solving, and what tool you're using can be either at the forefront or it can be just part of the journey that you're kind of laying out for them. Yeah, because you're always going to use new technologies. It'd be sad to be like, OK, guys, goodbye to this audience, hello to this audience, because I'm using a new technology. Technology is always going to be evolving, basically. So what? At the end of the day, what

stays constant is you. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense and I think that works. But if your niche is that like solving problems with technology, right. And what I what I was doing, it was more like learning this technology, yeah. You see, so not actually solving a problem with this technology, but learning this technology. Yeah. And this could also be a niche, right?

Learning technologies. I can make 456 videos about this technology and then in the end, just say, OK, that's my verdict. That's why I think about it. And now let's move on to the next one. And then you can build an audience that are interested in that. Yeah, as well. I've seen people do that as well, and I think it still works. Yeah. I just think it would be more interesting to hear from you as a person rather than kind of the technologies. But if it's a learning journey,

it's different, I feel like. But then the technologies are really at the forefront. Yeah, that's the difficult part. But you're now ready to say like goodbye to Redis for now and

pick up new technologies. Yeah, yeah. I would actually like to to take this moment in your broadcast if you allow it right to say. To see a proper good buy. It's not a good buy. It's not like I'm not going to use Red is. I really enjoyed the technology and I found it very fun and effective to use. But it's time to move on. It's time to move to new technologies to learn about, go dive deeper in in coddling, Dive deeper in Flutter, I built 2 apps recently in Flutter.

I started learning Flutter in March and I already built 2 apps. They're both in the Apple App store. I got to put them in the Google Play store, but I'm procrastinating about it and one of them is generating revenue actually already. Yeah, $10 the total. Yeah, good stuff. Three sales for March is not that though, yeah, this is the start. Yeah, yeah. And I haven't like advertised it with exception in the company.

Right advertised. Sorry, advertised it to to our colleagues, but I I haven't advertised it online. Yeah, you see, good stuff. Yeah, people found it. It solved their problem and they and they decided to pay for it.

It feels like you're always working on something, right? Invite us a YouTube video blog post. Now it now it's an app and you've already built it and it's making money. Like, how? Where is this kind of drive to always create? Where does that come from? Because I've thought about creating an app. I've never built one. This podcast is just magic. And it happened, but it's the

only thing I've done. I've never written A blog post other than I had to do one for job interview, but that doesn't count. It's not published anywhere. So yeah, I don't. I just do the podcast. That's it. You do everything it looks like. I don't. I don't do everything, but I not yet, yeah. I don't do. I don't do. Everything. But I I like to feel productive. That's the thing. You see. I hate to sit down and just like watch a movie. Yeah.

And my heart and my sorry. And my wife waits that personality trait of mine because sometimes she just wants to lay down be together cuddle. And I'm like, no, I got to. I got to bring something. Yeah. Yeah. Yesterday, for example, she was, she was kind of mad at me because we were in bed. She was about to sleep and I. Took my laptop and started writing an article, My next article about coddling and going functional. But I think that that's the point about me. I hate.

I hate being idle. You see, I like to work. I like to do things. I like to feel productive. You see, I gotta feel productive. I gotta feel like I'm growing. It doesn't have to be like making money, but that drives me. Yeah, I want to do things that make money is it has always been there because I like being productive. I also like relaxing. I'm a very relaxed person.

Yeah. Where did this drive to for kind of productivity come from? I think it has to do with my upbringing, yeah. See, my dad, for example, my dad was a workaholic, and I think he still is. Actually, he works a lot. But since I was little, right? And I was born in Brazil, I didn't tell anybody that. Yeah, but I was born in Brazil and Brazilian. And I think that the mindset in Brazil is, is a bit different. See, because in Brazil you see a lot of poverty.

Poverty is right on the corner, right? So you're constantly afraid of being poor, of like, not having enough money to pay for rent or to not have a place to leave. And since I was a kid, my dad would come to me and I say, hey dad, can you pick, can you buy this toy for me, for example? And he would say no, You know what? I have a lot of debts. I have a lot of that, a lot of

that, a lot of that. And I grew up thinking, shit, everybody has a lot of debt and I'm going to have a lot of debt, you see. And it's like a snowball right now. You start growing up or start understanding it that if you have a lot of debt, it's like a snowball. It's just starts getting bigger and bigger and bigger and so like you're trapped in there and you cannot get out of there anymore and that's your life paying debt. So I was really afraid of that,

you see. So that's why I started pursuing a financial independence, seeing that's what I'm trying to do. I like working. I like solving problems. I like working for other people. But at the same time, I don't want to feel dependent. See, if, for example, my current employer doesn't want me anymore, I don't want to be afraid. I don't want to be afraid of ending up in the streets. You see, that's that's the

thing. But I I said all of this and I'm not really sure if this is actually the reason why. I'm very. I like to do things. This is something that I that it was like since I was a kid. I like to. Do something. Always, Yeah. Build something or break something. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, right? In in the Netherlands, you

retire when you're like 60 something years old and it's rising. Probably when we retire, it's gonna be like 70 something years old, gonna be something ridiculous. And those people that have always done in something day in, day out, right, have always kind of fun fulfillment and being productive, all of a sudden they don't do that anymore. They have to do something else,

right? They've worked their whole lives, financial independence, they they get their pension and then sometimes they get depressed. And yeah, I think that's it's a weird way, right? Because you're always working towards something. Then when you achieve it, let's say it's financial independence. Let's say you work so hard that in your mid 30s, your mid 40s, somewhere in your 50s, you don't have to work anymore. You're like, I can, I can live the rest of my life without

working. And my kids and their kids are all fine. No debt, no debt whatsoever. My dad's debts paid off basically as a matter of saying then what do you do because you still have this feeling of wanting to be productive. Are you going to pick up

something like around the house? That's what I've seen a lot of like my relatives do. I have big family like you have lots of examples where people start gardening and stuff or taking care of chickens for example, like people do, then stuff that makes them happy, which is non financial related, I feel like. Are you going to be the same?

Yeah, that, that, that's nice. That that you that you mentioned that because I've been in that journey of trying to figure it out what I was going to do if I became independent financially for more than a year now, right? Because the company I was working for, they had like crazy benefits, right? So we had unlimited holidays. We had true flexible hours. So I could start working whenever I wanted and stop working whenever I wanted if I attended the meetings right.

And I was productive, I delivered. People were happy with my work. And what does all of this mean? It means that I could be sorry. I forgot to mention that it was also remote. So it was a company that was in one country and that was living in another. So it was 100% remote. Yeah. And I so I could be whatever I wanted and I could do whatever I wanted, basically. On whenever I wanted. Yeah. So whatever. Whatever. Whenever, yeah, complete flexibility. That's retirement.

Yeah, right. I mean, kind of. You still have to work though. You still have to work, yeah. Yeah. But you have the flexible hours and you actually have to produce, right?

And then I started reading the book for our work week and I started having sites like oh can I work 4 hours a day? And I talk to one of the founders of the company and he was like, yeah, if you produce as much as you do, that's fine. I mean, if you don't, if you don't leave your team hanging, things like that and say, okay, let's try it, then it's difficult. It's difficult because during your work day, you do a lot of things that are actually not

related to work, right? You start working a little bit productive then. I didn't know. You end up watching a YouTube video. You end up reading an article. You go and play with your dog. I don't know, things like that. You go and have a coffee with a coworker and then let's say that you're already working like 6 hours a day and the other two hours are just doing other

things right? What if you could get the six hours and condense then into part of your day and get the other two hours and give it to yourself to do whatever you want? So that's that was my idea, that's what I want to try to do and how can I do it? So I said I thought, okay, if I'm working with everybody else at the same time, I'm going to be distracted more often, right? Because people call you to talk about random things.

At this colleague he would call me to say what if if I wanted to know what were the 50 or the three countries just? Give you trivia, the three countries that we're going to come out of, the 50 states of the United States in 20 years, you know this, this articles that are there just for for getting money from advertisement to see and and click and people who click it. And I was like, damn, I got to get rid of that. And how can I do it? I have flexible hours. I'm going to start working at

4:00 AM in the morning. So I was waking up at 4:00 AM working until let's say 10, o'clock 11:00 o'clock. I would have the meetings in the morning and then it wasn't always like that, but like sometimes I had to work like until 1/2 depending. But I had like my afternoon, you see. But then I started realizing, what do I do now that I have the afternoon I got to work more because that's that's what I know how to do, right? And at the time, man, I I was almost burning out because I was

waking up early. Yeah, makes sense. Yes. And that. I mean before that, before I start working at at 4I, I was waking up at 6-7. I was going straight into the computer and I would stay in the computer until 1011 in the night and go to sleep with the computer by my side shows almost burning out. And that's what I knew how to do, man. I only knew how to work and were in COVID times. I would go out with my dog to walk him. I wasn't going to the gym.

I wasn't exercising, I wasn't meeting with friends. I was working all the time. And then I started thinking, man, I don't want to do that. I don't want to if if I have like a free time, I don't want to keep thinking about work. I got to think about something else, right? And and that's what I've been trying to do since then. And then there are other things that happen in this journey that helps illustrate that. But yeah, I I think I already talked to. You have you found a mode that

kind of works for you now? Because I feel like you're still trying to be super productive, right? Your output is still a lot. Maybe it's not all work related, but still little projects are still work because you're working on them. Do you feel like you have a kind of a better grip on not burning out in a sense? Oh, I feel like my discipline is scrap, man. Yeah, yeah. I don't feel like I'm mass productive as I wanted to be. See, I really wanted to have,

like, a routine. And I'm working on that now. Now, now I'm being able to do it, you see, because now I'm waking up at 6:00 o'clock every morning. I'm going to the gym. I've been doing that for two months. I come back, I take my shower, I get the car. I come to the office. I work throughout the day and I get home after six or I leave 5530 get there 6 sure I woke my dog and then my idea is to stay with my wife and I started like cooking, trying to cook at least

you see more recently. Not every day, but I try it right and do other things as well. I start playing, but Dell, for example, I play twice last week. I'm gonna play again this Friday. Nice. I'm exploring, you see, trying to find other things that I like to do. Yeah, non work related things, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, I go. It was hard. And I feel like a lot of people still have kind of the after effects of it. Because you couldn't go, you couldn't go to the gym. Gym was not out.

You have a dog. You were allowed to walk your dog out. Yeah. If you don't have a dog, you stay inside, basically. Yeah, it was hard. Yeah, I want to kind of zoom in on the apps you create. But before I do that, I've never

met anyone that their company policy was unlimited holidays. Was it really unlimited holidays or was it just kind of a BS rule and no one took holidays at all? No, no, no. I think. I think it was, yeah. See, there was only this guy. He wasn't actually taking holidays, he was taking in medical leave. Yeah, so and he abused that for a long time.

I'm not sure what happened to him because when I left the company he he was still working there, but but most people they they would take like 10 days more, 20 days more, not not that much you see and sometimes a few others would take like 5 days less depending. It depends on the person, but it wasn't exaggerated or abusive, you see. But it was was peaceful, you see, because you didn't have to think like, oh, am I going to have holidays for spending

Christmas with my family? Yeah. Or am I going to have holidays if I, if I take this Friday off to go to the lake with my wife, for example, she didn't have to worry about that. So. So that was that was very Peace of Mind, you know? And no one looked at you funny like, oh, you're taking a holiday. No, no, no, that's good. Nobody did that. Yeah. No, no, no. I like that, yeah. I limited holidays the right way. Yeah. Because what I've heard is like.

It's unlimited holidays, but no one actually takes holidays because people are afraid that if you take holidays, people look at you funny. But I'm glad that's not the case. Yeah, this company wasn't in the company was great. We had like a really great culture there. You see, people got along very well. People are productive. People are looking for each other. Yeah. Yeah. And the teams, I mean, they, they look for each other for

real, you see. So if you took a holiday, people say okay, you can take this week. No problem. We can, we can do your part of the work and vice versa. So it was a really great culture. That's nice.

Yeah, really cool. Talk to me about the apps you created, because I think I've seen screenshot here and there on Slack, but I don't know exactly how it got started. Did you just randomly wake up with this idea and you created an app? Or what's kind of your process

there? OK, so I have this friend, yeah, this Portuguese friend Ivo. And he's been working with Flutter for a couple of years already and he's been trying to talk to me. He's been trying to talk me into Flutter for a long time already, you see. And this year I didn't have a project at the time here at Xibia and I thought okay, perhaps this is a nice way to get to get my my time field right and be productive. So I started learning about Flutter.

I started building an app and the first app that I built was an Atom visualization too. So you can you can open the app and then you can choose the the chemical element and you can see like the core and all the the orbitals around the core running with the with the right number of electrons, right. So it's just a visualization too, just for me to experiment with that to to publish it into the Apple Store and see how it

works and it's there. I think it had like 60 downloads already, yeah, yeah, which is nice. What about the idea, though? You were just like. Atoms. No, no, no. The idea was I had, I had some free time, right? And I was like, actually, I was, I was watching a video about black holes. And I thought, damn, that's something that I like. But I never delved into see physics and constellations and stars and astronomy in general. But I'd like to. And I have this friend who's a

physicist. Is this how I say it? Yeah, Physicist. And he started working with software programming as well. And I went to him and I said, hey, I wanted, I wanted to learn more about it. And he said we should start, like reading this book. Remember the name of the book now? But it's even a line. And you have like all the sections there. And you start from the very beginning. And the very beginning were the the atoms. Yeah. And then I started reading about it because I wanted to learn

everything about physics. And then I started learning the first thing I said, I said that's it. I got to build an app, and I never touched that book again, but I build the app. I. Build the app and I showed it to him and he was like, man, that's not how atoms really look like in real life. Yeah, but I said, but that's good enough.

It gives the idea, right? I saw a video of how they work and they're completely different from what we learn at you know, the the, the React icon, completely wrong. That's not how an atom looks, yeah, yeah. That's hilarious. Yeah.

And the other app, I, I really like languages and I and I'd like to see how languages evolve. So you have, for example, how do you say dog in Portuguese? You say go, right. And then how do you say that in Spanish, Peru? Nothing I like. But then you go to France and it's Shia, and then you go to Italy and it's Connie. All right. So how, how, how did these words evolve geographically? That's what I wanted to understand.

And I could go to Google Translator anywhere else and like, look for the words and place them on a map myself. I said, that's too much work for a software developer, right? You gotta build an app, yeah. And then I build the app, which is called Word Map Translator. It's available on the App Store and there is a free version of it where you can translate a word to any word in European languages. And then you're going to see all of them placed on the map.

And if you pay a little price of $3 lifetime lifetime, listen to me, you can translate to all the languages available in in Google Translator and basically fill up the world with all the translations, yeah. Yeah, good stuff, man. Yeah, this, this love for languages. You just thought, let me build an app for that. Like, I have a lot of ideas, right? I make little notes. I talk to Abdullah about this. He also makes notes. He gives them out.

I kind of keep them with me. Sometimes I give them out, but I never create. A lot of kind of artifacts. Like I've never written an app. I create software, it's for a lot of companies I work with. That's it. Usually haven't created something for myself.

You created 2 apps just randomly within a few months. Like one of them is making money even like how do you do that? Do you pick up an idea and execute it like effortlessly, Effortlessly. And that word is hard, cuz I always have a hard time starting in that aspect. It depends. It depends on the idea, right. I really wanted to accomplish that idea of the of the word map translator, you see. And then I started working on it. I started talking about it.

And that's funny because we have the Flutter Dutch meetup community here in the in the Netherlands, right? And they wanted to attend their their meetup, but they didn't have spots anymore, free spots anymore. The only way I could attend was by speaking, by doing a lightning talk. And I said, yeah, OK, I'm going, man. Yes. And since I had just learned about, like flutter map and how how to manipulate maps in Flutter, I said that's what I'm

going to talk about. So I spent like 5 minutes in their meetup talking about how flutter map works. Yes. And that gives you motivation, right. Because you go there, people applaud you. And then you tell them we're going to finish the app in two weeks. And then you say, oh, I got to finish the app in two weeks. People are waiting for that, even though they weren't, of course. But you have that in your mind, right? Yeah. Set the expectation like that. That's hilarious, yeah, I said.

I said them to myself. You see, And I really thought that this could be a way of of generating revenue. Yeah. And it worked. Cuz I'm not advertising the app and people are subscribing. I'm not subscribing. They're paid for. They're paying for their lifetime. Yeah, in that purchase. I like that a lot.

I feel like I didn't expect this, but even those kind of components, those apps that you've built all have kind of the learning component with them. Either you were learning something and then you figured out, hey, I can do this and probably find more fulfillment, find more enjoyment and kind of reach some maybe monetization goals here and there, like more fulfillment in general. And then you created the Atom app and then you figured, hey,

this might be a great idea. It's probably not a solved problem yet. Let me create an app for that and then learn more about Flutter and how it works and stuff like that. And there's a meet up and I go there as well. It's like. I'd love the journey that you're kind of on and it feels like when opportunity is there, you just go for it. Yeah, whenever you don't. Even think twice exactly that, that that's the thing. If a door opens, I enter. Yeah, yes, always. Always.

I'm always like that. Yeah. Have you ever regretted doing that? No. No, not at all. Man. 0 regrets. 0 regrets. I actually regret not doing that. OK, yes. I never have an opportunity. I I take it, you see. And sometimes you can have awkward situations out of there. Tell me about that one. Yeah, cuz I speak Italian, right? And. But I didn't have much, much opportunity to practice Okay.

And I was working in Portugal at the time, and I was walking with some friends into a bakery during work time and during a break, right? And there were some girls speaking in Italian behind us. And my friend, a friend of mine, said, hey, they're speaking Italian, should talk to them. I didn't think twice. I just turned around and started speaking Italian. Right. But then I said, I'm, I'm going to say that in English. But I said it in Italian, right? I said hi, what are you?

But I meant, how are you exactly? I said, what are you? And he said Italian. And I was like, that doesn't sound right. And then I started talking to them. And then I realized that an older man approached it and kept staring at me and and he was like, hey, what, what do you what do you want? And I realized that it was their parent that their father and that they were just like being tourists is there. And the guy thought that it was like trying to hit on them, but it wasn't my purpose.

So I just explained, no, I'm trying to practice Italian. I never see somebody speaking Italian take the opportunity. And he he said alright and I said OK.

And he was like, yeah, go away and leave my daughters alone. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. That's hilarious. Yeah, yeah. Let's, let's run it off. On that note, How? How was this? Was this kind of what you expected? It's it's done? No. No, we're still recording, OK, But what do you mean expected? Was this kind of what you expected going into it? I asked people that at the end, Actually, yeah. And keep podcasts, I mean, no,

it was completely different. Yeah, I thought it would feel much more tense, actually, Pretty much. I told you, you didn't. Have to be nervous at all. Yeah, exactly. But that that that's difficult, right? I mean it. You say something, but my body does something completely different, right? I I told you like I had this blood, this blood rushing from my coughs. I could feel it. That was a lot of fun, man. Thank you so much for coming on. Then I'm going to round it off.

Thank you so much for listening in. I'm going to put all of our socials and some other stuff in the description below, check them out, let them know you came from our show. And with that being said, thank you for listening. We'll see you on the next one.