maury91

I got recently laid off (the first time in my life ), and I have worked for around 11 years without being more than 2 days unemployed; I'm currently doing rounds of interviews and for the first time in my life, I have an extreme amount of free time.

I can imagine people would recommend me to use this free time to follow my passions, get some rest, play videogames or do anything that is not working; but I'm not the kind of person that likes any of those things, I like to do something constructive, and I would like if this something can help me now or in future with my job search.

I saw many job posts asking for a Github account to see what contributions I have done to open source, and unfortunately, my contributions amount to none, the companies I have worked for do not publish open source code, and with 2 hours of commute + 9 hours being in the office when I'm home I don't feel like I want to open my personal computer.

With this in mind, I thought "Why not do a video series where I show my front-end skills". This will kill two birds with one stone, first I will get some contributions to dummy projects on Github and second I can show my reasoning on video.

The first problem is that I don't have video editing knowledge, and I feel that will eat the majority of the time, resulting in a project that is less focused on what I'm aiming for.

To avoid the video editing problem, I plan to do live coding, I believe thousands of developers did this before me, and I want to do a topic that is different than usual, with this in mind my topic of choice is to live code a web framework, my framework of choice is React.

I plan to go through these milestones:

  1. Rendering JSX directly into the DOM: get a js compiled through babel and just make it work
  2. Create a shadow dom  
  3. Optimise the shadow dom  
  4. Support all react hooks  
  5. Further optimisations  
  6. Re-create redux  
  7. Suspense ( Lazy loading )  
  8. Re-create react-router  
  9. Using babel API create a different output for jsx files ( different syntax )  
  10. Create browser extensions for developers

Note: I chose these milestones to make the video series help people understand how React works on the inside

And following these rules:

  1. No peeking on React source code  
  2. No stack overflow  
  3. No copilot/chatGTP/any AI  
  4. Looking at React documentation is OK

The idea is to retro-engineer React, I know this looks like it contradicts the point of helping people understand the inner workings of React, but I want this video series to have some challenges ( and external help will remove that ), and the final product must be compatible with a subset of React capabilities so with it being compatible it must have similar inner workings, so even if not identical I believe they will be similar enough to help people understand how React works.

Now that I laid out all my thoughts, I ask you for some advice:

  1. What platform is best to start? ( I was thinking youtube )  
  2. How to get the first views? ( My feeling is that I would be live-streaming to literally no one for months )  
  3. Any other advice that I could not think of asking?