Retiring the Udemy Course
Many years ago, when I worked at Amazon, my team went through one of our uncountable reorgs. In the process, I got a new skip level manager (my manager's manager) in the person of Frank Kane.
I can't say I remember how long that lasted before Frank moved to another team and eventually to Florida. We certainly had fun, though!
Years later, after I had also left Amazon, Frank put out a call for people interested in building online courses with him. I jumped at the opportunity! We talked about it and debated about certification courses and settled on a less ambitious course about server-less applications on AWS.
It was supposed to be a test run with more courses coming later.
Of course, being a test run didn't make it easy. I remember a couple months of working on this course. My wife and I had a new baby in the house, and I would dedicate 1-2 hours most evenings. I could produce the materials for one 8-10 minute lesson in about an hour. Frank would almost always have them recorded before I was able to get another batch of lessons to him.
Eventually, we got the course published into the world. It's been around 8 years since we started getting students.
It was never a particularly lucrative course (especially by Frank's standards), and I never had time to continue and build more courses with or without Frank's help. Still, the course stood the test of time, though not without real effort from Frank (mostly) and me (occasionally).
Over 8 years, we've seen so many changes that required re-recording or actual course rework:
- several AWS console UI redesigns
- S3 adding extra protection to prevent public buckets
- reorganization of client libraries under Amplify
- an entirely new type of API Gateway offering we never incorporated
- the addition of Promises and React to the JavaScript ecosystem which I never had time to go back and incorporate
- and many, many other things...
The last breakage that required my input was in July, 2024. At that time, the change I made asked people to download an old version of the AWS Amplify library in order to not rewrite huge parts of the course. Frank and I decided that this was the last time. We hit another issue in February and started pulling the plug.
This course has been both a little thing (financially) and a big thing (accomplishment) for me. So I want to make sure to acknowledge how awesome Frank has been throughout. If you need to learn anything, please go check out his site and see if he has a course for it. You will not be disappointed in his courses.
And for the almost 25,000 students of our course, I appreciate all of you as well.