[Announcement] Prepare for launch

Hello again!

I have recorded a 9-lesson video course that starts with conditionals and case expressions and reworks the same code to demonstrate use of Maybe, Either, Monad, Applicative, newtype, and a few other things that crop up along the way.

Meanwhile, Chris has recorded the first segment of what will be an ongoing project, using Haskell and Nix, on the making of this site. This first installment concerns using Nix for deploying on AWS.

I can’t say we ever thought making video content that we were happy with would be easy exactly, but it proved to take longer than we thought. Our two different desktops produced wildly different results, with mine showing a headache-inducing flicker. Once we had environments we could reliably record with, we started shooting a lot of video and learning to edit it and also ensure we have good audio quality.

One of our goals is to provide text for each video in a project or course. The text is not a verbatim transcription of the video, but covers roughly the same material. The videos give us a chance to show what happens when you make different kinds of mistakes, but the text is more useful when you want to look back, review, refresh your memory.

Most of the content outside the projects and courses, we conceive first as written content, so we write the articles first. In some cases, we are also adding videos that cover roughly the same material (again, they do not cover the text verbatim). We’re hoping in this way to make our content flexible enough to fit different needs at different times; maybe you want to watch a video while you’re knitting but will also want to refer back to a text later. Maybe you prefer reading but would also like to see what all this looks like in the REPL. We don’t know your life and won’t judge how you prefer to learn.

We think we’ve made enough progress now at having a usable site with instructional content that we’re turning on payments now. Some content, and nearly all the video content, will only be available to paid subscribers.

We are each teaching some Haskell and Nix courses in Europe soon. Our goal is to have as much content as possible live before we leave for Europe, with additions coming throughout the month of June. By the end of June, there will be several hours’ worth of video courses and projects live, along with helpful tips for JavaScript and Python programmers who are learning Haskell and more.