Nine years SwedenCpp on YouTube

When I started SwedenCpp/StockholmCpp back in 2016, and we had our first event with a speaker, I thought it would be nice to have a video recording of the talks. Not for YouTube, but so that speakers could get feedback and use the recordings for self-study purposes.

My initial thought was that a mobile phone recording would be sufficient for that purpose. But then Paul, Kjell-Olov, and Jonas came and we had a camera and a recording device on the table. Paul then took the first steps in video editing, using KDELive, I think.

Then the results got uploaded, and the rest is history :-)

It turned out that recording, editing and releasing is quite a lot of work. And for volunteer work, it’s hard to be consistent. Since I started to enjoy the recordings, I gradually took over more and more of the job. I invested in equipment and learned about recording and editing. Now I do most of the work myself. I appreciate having a second camera on site for the speaker recording. For some time now, Ulf has been helping me. He has an awesome camera and knows how to use it. You can see the difference.

I enjoy this work a lot. It creates some stress, but I don’t mind. Doing videos is fun. You record, edit, release, and everyone understands the result. With my development work, this feedback loop sometimes looks different.

And there is a lot of tech and software in the process. So I plan to continue the work.

The only reason why the YouTube channel is monetized is to have some control over the advertising shown. Because without that, YouTube will place ads into the videos as they want. So I had to monetize it. But there isn’t even $5 on average per month. However, this pays for the hosting of the SwedenCpp homepage, and the release radar I run for our SwedenCpp Twitter and Bluesky accounts. So it does add some value.

But the real value is the knowledge archived and shared.