cappert · December 12, 2015 04:58
diff --git a/transcript.txt b/transcript.txt
 starts à 14:20

 GREGG POLLACK
 It's better, I had an expresso yesterday and it wasn't as good. That's decent. It's only slighly crappy.

 PHILIPPE 
 Alright, so we are with Gregg Pollack, at TakeOff Conf[1], I guess that's the only interview we're gonna do in English, actually.

 GREGG POLLACK
 oh, no.

 PHILIPPE 
 So can you just introduce yourself ?

 GREGG POLLACK
 Sure, my name is Gregg Pollack, I run two companies, I help run Envy Labs[2], and also a little bootstrap startup called Code School[3], I also do the Ruby5 podcast[4], started that a while back, though we got lots of co-hosts that help us with Ruby5 now.
 And then also, we did Rails For Zombies[5], which is what people usually know me from.

 PHILIPPE
 So I remember when, like back in 2006, I was learning Ruby and Rails, and I was seeing some videos of you teaching people the basics of Rails, how did you get into the thing of "teaching people" ?

 GREGG POLLACK
 Well, I always enjoyed education, you know, as some people when they want to give back to the community, they create open-source, I don't create open-source, I seem to create educational stuff, that's what I do when I want to create something.
 And so, it started out with blog posts, over at Rails Envy and then... I've always enjoyed video so just figuring a way to combine the video with the teaching seemed pretty natural. With the free stuff and then trying to make a living of it, and then putting out a lot of free content... I've always really enjoyed free content and always figure out a way to create more of it, and even now with Code School, right now we have three teams at Code School, one team is working on web dev courses, one team is working on iOS courses, because of the Kickstarter we did[6], and one team is working on free courses, we're all working of free stuff.

 PHILIPPE
 Code School is a great concept and it's a great app, how long did it take from the idea to like...

 GREGG POLLACK
 Well, Code School was never like: "let's come up with the idea for a product and see if we can make money", right, we created Rails for Zombies, and Rails for Zombies was just another free piece of content that I was putting out there, it was the first time we combined video with coding in the browser but we weren't planning on making any money from it and we still don't, it's a free course.
 Now we put it out there and we got so much positive feedback from that and like: "wow people really like this format, maybe there's something to that", that we decided to maybe "let's create a few more" ...courses in this sort of format and create some really interactive ones and sell them as one-offs. So, right now if you go to Code School it's just, only subscriptions you can only get a subscription, but when we first started it it was 25$ of 35$ for a individual course. So we were lucky enough that it was a business model that we could try and do a small piece. 
 We maybe spent 30000$ on creating a single course and we will get back maybe, double of what we've put into it. "All right, let's do another one", spend the money on creating another one and get backed up of what we put into it so it allows us to really not have to invest that much money, we were never out that much money to begin with. We wouldn't have been able to do it though without the consulting, it's the consulting that we use to fund the projects.

 PHILIPPE
 So currently we have Envy Labs, the Ruby5 podcast, Code School... how do you manage your time into those different projects ?

 GREGG POLLACK
 I manage my time horrible. That's how I do it.
 No, well, I've learned, more that I ever cared to know about business in the last 3 years, which means I do a lot less programming which also kind of sucks, I always joke to everybody in my biz, I see like, Java opportunities and I tease : "Oh look, I wanna go, I want to be a full time iOS dev, I wanna go join that job" because lately I've been learning some iOS. But really, it's all about figuring out what you can delegate and where your time is best spent, so I'm constantly trying on focusing on that, I've been able to delegate a lot and I've learned a lot about business, which I'll talk a little bit about in the talk I'll give tomorrow about figuring out... There's these people called project managers, which not only are good at organization, but they actually enjoy it, there's also designers obviously, and then also finding the right teachers, marketing, sales, and trying to hand off, take some of those hats off so I can focus to where my time is best spent, which I feel like right now, it's being the editor in chief at Code School, if anybody says like what's my job, I say it's the editor in chief at Code School, because I don't create as much content as I used to, I have other people that I help create the content, I help refine the content and proof content so that it's top-notch. That's probably where my time is well spent so that we can create the best educational software which is really what I'm most passionate about.

 PHILIPPE
 That's great

 GREGG POLLACK
 That was a long way to answer it, I'm sorry.

 FABIEN
 No that's great. all right.

 GREGG POLLACK
 Well, I can tell you what's coming up with Code School, too.

 FABIEN
 oh, go ahead.

 GREGG POLLACK
 So, towards the end of this month, I think the first week of February, we're coming out with the second part of our Backbone course[7], a lot of people wanted us to do more Backbone, so we're doing a Backbone part 2[8] and then we've got some really interesting projects coming out later this month as well, one with Google, we've been working with Google to do a course on Chrome dev tools which has been a challenge. So, you're familiar with Chrome dev tools[9] it's your debugger, it's your console, it's your DOM, it's your profiler, it's the network panel, it's the memory, it's the framerate, it's all this stuff that you can do and a lot of people, I don't think, know all the magic that Google has put into it so we contacted Google to see, you know : "hey, can we work with you guys to put together a free Chrome dev tools course" and they were really interested.
 And the another challenge was how do you figure out a way to do that in an interactive way in my mind it wasn't worth...
 I'm allergic to multiple choices questions, i'll never do multiple choices questions, right and I feel like something is only worth teaching if you can do it in a learn-by-doing sort of way so you teach them and they actually have to use the tool, use the skill that you just taught them, so, how do you do that with dev tools, well we worked with Google, they created an extension for us that will allow us to actually detect when people click on things inside of Chrome dev tools so we'll say: "look like there was a bug navigate to the part in the file where there was a bug and when people click on the filename and number it opens up and a little checkbox happens in our webpage, "ok you did that step here's the next step to debug". So it just run you through the whole process which i'm really excited to get that out.
 and then what else do we got coming up that I can talk about...
 Oh, next month we're doing a bunch of Rails 4 stuff, we're putting out an official Rails 4 course which just focuses on teaching developers who are already on Rails the new things in Rails 4, I don't know what we're going to call it yet and we're trying to debate some sort of Zombies, it has to be a Zombies theme, right?
 I don't know. And we can't call it "Rails - the number four - Zombies" because that would be confusing.
 So we're going to put out a Rails 4 course next month, as well as, we're trying to go back right know and actually update all our existing content so, hopefully Rails for Zombies, and Rails for Zombies 2, and Rails Testing for Zombies and Testing with RSpec we're trying to update all of them to be Rails 4 compatible.

 FABIEN
 Tedious, isn't it ?


 GREGG POLLACK
 Oh yes, yes. So much content to update it's ridiculous.
 It's doable, it's not horrible, you just have to do it.
 and then in March I think, we've been pushing off our Ember course forever, Ember was supposed to be December, "Ember in December !", that didn't happen.
 That is being pushed off. So there's got to be an Ember course at some point but I think that's ok, because I keep hearing back from the Ember team : "wait for 1.0, you can't put out anything before 1.0", so it's probably a good thing anyway, we probably wouldn't have been able to produce it in December.

 What else... after that there's probably going to be a more advanced Git course, a lot of people have been asking for that, another sequel to Git Real that gets into more advanced Git stuff, and then two other free courses after the Google dev tools, I love the free stuff, I'm always trying to get sponsors so that we can just offset the costs have you seen the sponsors up on there, all that means I was trying to cover costs, we don't really makes money off the sponsorships so we're just trying to get paid for the time we put into it if we can, why not, if we can.
 So there's two of them, one is probably gonna be a Javascript course, a lot of people have been asking us for a Javascript from the Ground Up, so it'll be beginner course, so you for guys probably I'd think I'll be boring.
 another one that is on tip of my tongue that needs to be a free course that we create... oh, I don't know...
 Oh I know, yes, we have this course HTML5/CSS3 which need to get redone because some of the stuff in there has been outdated and some of the standards have been updated so I think we're gonna take the course, update it, and make it a free one.

 PHILIPPE
 That's cool, so you're here for TakeOff Conf, are you like staying in Europe or in France for just a few days.

 GREGG POLLACK
 Not so much, no.
 I got one day in Paris to walk around and have an amazing dinner there and got some pastries and coffee like you do...

 FABIEN
 Maybe you got a team here in France ?

 GREGG POLLACK
 No, no, well, I did bring with me Olivier Lacan[c] which is part of my team in Orlando. He's from from Paris but he lives in Orlando.
 He did a talk this morning here at the conference.
 but I'm leaving Saturday morning, I gotta get back because, kids mostly.

 PHILIPPE
 allright so it's a short trip in Europe...

 FABIEN
 One final question : what about translating the content into another language like French ?

 GREGG POLLACK
 You know, we've been going back and forth with that I'm not really convinced yet that it's worth our time yet.
 to do the internationalization. I think we estimated that in order to go through, convert Code School and then convert 3 courses would probably take like 500 developers-hours.

 PHILIPPE
 ok, and could that be community-based like Open source just the content or give a way for people to just translate it.
 I guess that Dropbox[a] and Basecamp[b], a while ago, did that.

 GREGG POLLACK
 the hard part isn't the translation, the hard part is the code it is internationalizing all the codebases, and we made it 
 kind of harder on ourselves because we got like , services, it makes sense from an architecture perspective but with Code School
 you got : the Code School main application, the billing application and each time you create a course, it's a whole another application. So at this point we have 15 courses and there's definitely some shared code between the two of them we got like some gems, like shared codebases but still, having to go back and if you think about it, it's not just Code School not just the billing system not just every single courses but each of the course have executers, right, that's another app, it's the stateless executer that sits behind the scenes and executes your Git or executes your Javascript and runs your tests against it, so that's another app on top of that. That app needs to also give good error messages in that language of choice, hopefully and give good feedback in that language of choice so, it is a huge undertaking, and I'm not sure that payoff is there yet, maybe when we get bigger, maybe a year from now, but I think we're gonna put it off for right now.
 But the other thing that we've been throwing around... I don't know if I should say this... go ahead.

 PHILIPPE
 Oh, go ahead !

 GREGG POLLACK
 Oh, are you out of...

 RECORDING GRUNT
 Yeah, I'm out of memory.

 PHILIPPE
 Ok, allright.

 GREGG POLLACK
 You guys out ? 
 (You guys up ? )
 That was a perfect time to stop, "there's one more thing that I have to tell you about, it's so important"

 PHILIPPE
 Tomorrow maybe!

 FABIEN
 Yeah tomorrow, that would be a pleasure.

 GREGG POLLACK
 No, that's how you end the talk. 
 "Keep it up at Code School, we've got amazing things I can't tell you about !"

 PHILIPPE
 Thank you very much.

 GREGG POLLACK
 thanks, I've appreciated what you guys are doing for the community and whatnot, thanks.


 1. http://takeoffconf.com/
 2. http://envylabs.com/
 3. http://www.codeschool.com/
 4. http://ruby5.envylabs.com/
 5. http://railsforzombies.org/
 6. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eallam/try-ios-iphone-app-development-course
 7. http://www.codeschool.com/courses/anatomy-of-backbonejs
 8. Backbone part 2 course : Now available @ http://www.codeschool.com/courses/anatomy-of-backbonejs-part-2
 9. https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/
 a. Translating Dropbox : https://tech.dropbox.com/2011/04/hello-world/
 b. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2315-parlez-vous-franais-basecamp-goes-international
 c. http://olivierlacan.com/

 get reminded of upcoming courses @ http://www.codeschool.com/courses
	starts à 14:20

	GREGG POLLACK
	It's better, I had an expresso yesterday and it wasn't as good. That's decent. It's only slighly crappy.

	PHILIPPE
	Alright, so we are with Gregg Pollack, at TakeOff Conf[1], I guess that's the only interview we're gonna do in English, actually.

	GREGG POLLACK
	oh, no.

	PHILIPPE
	So can you just introduce yourself ?

	GREGG POLLACK
	Sure, my name is Gregg Pollack, I run two companies, I help run Envy Labs[2], and also a little bootstrap startup called Code School[3], I also do the Ruby5 podcast[4], started that a while back, though we got lots of co-hosts that help us with Ruby5 now.
	And then also, we did Rails For Zombies[5], which is what people usually know me from.

	PHILIPPE
	So I remember when, like back in 2006, I was learning Ruby and Rails, and I was seeing some videos of you teaching people the basics of Rails, how did you get into the thing of "teaching people" ?

	GREGG POLLACK
	Well, I always enjoyed education, you know, as some people when they want to give back to the community, they create open-source, I don't create open-source, I seem to create educational stuff, that's what I do when I want to create something.
	And so, it started out with blog posts, over at Rails Envy and then... I've always enjoyed video so just figuring a way to combine the video with the teaching seemed pretty natural. With the free stuff and then trying to make a living of it, and then putting out a lot of free content... I've always really enjoyed free content and always figure out a way to create more of it, and even now with Code School, right now we have three teams at Code School, one team is working on web dev courses, one team is working on iOS courses, because of the Kickstarter we did[6], and one team is working on free courses, we're all working of free stuff.

	PHILIPPE
	Code School is a great concept and it's a great app, how long did it take from the idea to like...

	GREGG POLLACK
	Well, Code School was never like: "let's come up with the idea for a product and see if we can make money", right, we created Rails for Zombies, and Rails for Zombies was just another free piece of content that I was putting out there, it was the first time we combined video with coding in the browser but we weren't planning on making any money from it and we still don't, it's a free course.
	Now we put it out there and we got so much positive feedback from that and like: "wow people really like this format, maybe there's something to that", that we decided to maybe "let's create a few more" ...courses in this sort of format and create some really interactive ones and sell them as one-offs. So, right now if you go to Code School it's just, only subscriptions you can only get a subscription, but when we first started it it was 25$ of 35$ for a individual course. So we were lucky enough that it was a business model that we could try and do a small piece.
	We maybe spent 30000$ on creating a single course and we will get back maybe, double of what we've put into it. "All right, let's do another one", spend the money on creating another one and get backed up of what we put into it so it allows us to really not have to invest that much money, we were never out that much money to begin with. We wouldn't have been able to do it though without the consulting, it's the consulting that we use to fund the projects.

	PHILIPPE
	So currently we have Envy Labs, the Ruby5 podcast, Code School... how do you manage your time into those different projects ?

	GREGG POLLACK
	I manage my time horrible. That's how I do it.
	No, well, I've learned, more that I ever cared to know about business in the last 3 years, which means I do a lot less programming which also kind of sucks, I always joke to everybody in my biz, I see like, Java opportunities and I tease : "Oh look, I wanna go, I want to be a full time iOS dev, I wanna go join that job" because lately I've been learning some iOS. But really, it's all about figuring out what you can delegate and where your time is best spent, so I'm constantly trying on focusing on that, I've been able to delegate a lot and I've learned a lot about business, which I'll talk a little bit about in the talk I'll give tomorrow about figuring out... There's these people called project managers, which not only are good at organization, but they actually enjoy it, there's also designers obviously, and then also finding the right teachers, marketing, sales, and trying to hand off, take some of those hats off so I can focus to where my time is best spent, which I feel like right now, it's being the editor in chief at Code School, if anybody says like what's my job, I say it's the editor in chief at Code School, because I don't create as much content as I used to, I have other people that I help create the content, I help refine the content and proof content so that it's top-notch. That's probably where my time is well spent so that we can create the best educational software which is really what I'm most passionate about.

	PHILIPPE
	That's great

	GREGG POLLACK
	That was a long way to answer it, I'm sorry.

	FABIEN
	No that's great. all right.

	GREGG POLLACK
	Well, I can tell you what's coming up with Code School, too.

	FABIEN
	oh, go ahead.

	GREGG POLLACK
	So, towards the end of this month, I think the first week of February, we're coming out with the second part of our Backbone course[7], a lot of people wanted us to do more Backbone, so we're doing a Backbone part 2[8] and then we've got some really interesting projects coming out later this month as well, one with Google, we've been working with Google to do a course on Chrome dev tools which has been a challenge. So, you're familiar with Chrome dev tools[9] it's your debugger, it's your console, it's your DOM, it's your profiler, it's the network panel, it's the memory, it's the framerate, it's all this stuff that you can do and a lot of people, I don't think, know all the magic that Google has put into it so we contacted Google to see, you know : "hey, can we work with you guys to put together a free Chrome dev tools course" and they were really interested.
	And the another challenge was how do you figure out a way to do that in an interactive way in my mind it wasn't worth...
	I'm allergic to multiple choices questions, i'll never do multiple choices questions, right and I feel like something is only worth teaching if you can do it in a learn-by-doing sort of way so you teach them and they actually have to use the tool, use the skill that you just taught them, so, how do you do that with dev tools, well we worked with Google, they created an extension for us that will allow us to actually detect when people click on things inside of Chrome dev tools so we'll say: "look like there was a bug navigate to the part in the file where there was a bug and when people click on the filename and number it opens up and a little checkbox happens in our webpage, "ok you did that step here's the next step to debug". So it just run you through the whole process which i'm really excited to get that out.
	and then what else do we got coming up that I can talk about...
	Oh, next month we're doing a bunch of Rails 4 stuff, we're putting out an official Rails 4 course which just focuses on teaching developers who are already on Rails the new things in Rails 4, I don't know what we're going to call it yet and we're trying to debate some sort of Zombies, it has to be a Zombies theme, right?
	I don't know. And we can't call it "Rails - the number four - Zombies" because that would be confusing.
	So we're going to put out a Rails 4 course next month, as well as, we're trying to go back right know and actually update all our existing content so, hopefully Rails for Zombies, and Rails for Zombies 2, and Rails Testing for Zombies and Testing with RSpec we're trying to update all of them to be Rails 4 compatible.

	FABIEN
	Tedious, isn't it ?


	GREGG POLLACK
	Oh yes, yes. So much content to update it's ridiculous.
	It's doable, it's not horrible, you just have to do it.
	and then in March I think, we've been pushing off our Ember course forever, Ember was supposed to be December, "Ember in December !", that didn't happen.
	That is being pushed off. So there's got to be an Ember course at some point but I think that's ok, because I keep hearing back from the Ember team : "wait for 1.0, you can't put out anything before 1.0", so it's probably a good thing anyway, we probably wouldn't have been able to produce it in December.

	What else... after that there's probably going to be a more advanced Git course, a lot of people have been asking for that, another sequel to Git Real that gets into more advanced Git stuff, and then two other free courses after the Google dev tools, I love the free stuff, I'm always trying to get sponsors so that we can just offset the costs have you seen the sponsors up on there, all that means I was trying to cover costs, we don't really makes money off the sponsorships so we're just trying to get paid for the time we put into it if we can, why not, if we can.
	So there's two of them, one is probably gonna be a Javascript course, a lot of people have been asking us for a Javascript from the Ground Up, so it'll be beginner course, so you for guys probably I'd think I'll be boring.
	another one that is on tip of my tongue that needs to be a free course that we create... oh, I don't know...
	Oh I know, yes, we have this course HTML5/CSS3 which need to get redone because some of the stuff in there has been outdated and some of the standards have been updated so I think we're gonna take the course, update it, and make it a free one.

	PHILIPPE
	That's cool, so you're here for TakeOff Conf, are you like staying in Europe or in France for just a few days.

	GREGG POLLACK
	Not so much, no.
	I got one day in Paris to walk around and have an amazing dinner there and got some pastries and coffee like you do...

	FABIEN
	Maybe you got a team here in France ?

	GREGG POLLACK
	No, no, well, I did bring with me Olivier Lacan[c] which is part of my team in Orlando. He's from from Paris but he lives in Orlando.
	He did a talk this morning here at the conference.
	but I'm leaving Saturday morning, I gotta get back because, kids mostly.

	PHILIPPE
	allright so it's a short trip in Europe...

	FABIEN
	One final question : what about translating the content into another language like French ?

	GREGG POLLACK
	You know, we've been going back and forth with that I'm not really convinced yet that it's worth our time yet.
	to do the internationalization. I think we estimated that in order to go through, convert Code School and then convert 3 courses would probably take like 500 developers-hours.

	PHILIPPE
	ok, and could that be community-based like Open source just the content or give a way for people to just translate it.
	I guess that Dropbox[a] and Basecamp[b], a while ago, did that.

	GREGG POLLACK
	the hard part isn't the translation, the hard part is the code it is internationalizing all the codebases, and we made it
	kind of harder on ourselves because we got like , services, it makes sense from an architecture perspective but with Code School
	you got : the Code School main application, the billing application and each time you create a course, it's a whole another application. So at this point we have 15 courses and there's definitely some shared code between the two of them we got like some gems, like shared codebases but still, having to go back and if you think about it, it's not just Code School not just the billing system not just every single courses but each of the course have executers, right, that's another app, it's the stateless executer that sits behind the scenes and executes your Git or executes your Javascript and runs your tests against it, so that's another app on top of that. That app needs to also give good error messages in that language of choice, hopefully and give good feedback in that language of choice so, it is a huge undertaking, and I'm not sure that payoff is there yet, maybe when we get bigger, maybe a year from now, but I think we're gonna put it off for right now.
	But the other thing that we've been throwing around... I don't know if I should say this... go ahead.

	PHILIPPE
	Oh, go ahead !

	GREGG POLLACK
	Oh, are you out of...

	RECORDING GRUNT
	Yeah, I'm out of memory.

	PHILIPPE
	Ok, allright.

	GREGG POLLACK
	You guys out ?
	(You guys up ? )
	That was a perfect time to stop, "there's one more thing that I have to tell you about, it's so important"

	PHILIPPE
	Tomorrow maybe!

	FABIEN
	Yeah tomorrow, that would be a pleasure.

	GREGG POLLACK
	No, that's how you end the talk.
	"Keep it up at Code School, we've got amazing things I can't tell you about !"

	PHILIPPE
	Thank you very much.

	GREGG POLLACK
	thanks, I've appreciated what you guys are doing for the community and whatnot, thanks.


	1. http://takeoffconf.com/
	2. http://envylabs.com/
	3. http://www.codeschool.com/
	4. http://ruby5.envylabs.com/
	5. http://railsforzombies.org/
	6. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eallam/try-ios-iphone-app-development-course
	7. http://www.codeschool.com/courses/anatomy-of-backbonejs
	8. Backbone part 2 course : Now available @ http://www.codeschool.com/courses/anatomy-of-backbonejs-part-2
	9. https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/
	a. Translating Dropbox : https://tech.dropbox.com/2011/04/hello-world/
	b. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2315-parlez-vous-franais-basecamp-goes-international
	c. http://olivierlacan.com/

	get reminded of upcoming courses @ http://www.codeschool.com/courses
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