April Challenge Over: Watch One Tech Video Every Day

I set my self a challenge for April to watch one technical video every day throughout the month. My rationale was that if I could apply the same discipline that I use to discriminate what I eat to what media I consume, that it would have a beneficial effect. Sure, fluffy, but the challenge was measurable and the penalty for missing one day was a donation of $20 to a .NET opensource project.

The month has come to and end and I did manage to watch one technical video each day, so no donations needed.

I intended to spend most of the month watching university lectures and Google Tech Talks, which I mostly did. It became harder and harder towards the end of the month to find an hour+ to watch a tech talk. I ended up catching a quick (15 minute) TED talk instead. TED talks are good (some can be great), but they are so brief that my retention is poor, and so high-level that I finish thinking that I have not learned very much at all.

The following image provides a breakdown of the sources for videos I watched. The "other" category includes random tech videos on youtube that do not fit into one of the other broader and popular categories.

I enjoyed almost all videos. I ranked each with a real-valued scoring between 0 and 5 and provided my own description in a spreadsheet. Five real highlight videos (in no particular order) were as follows:

• Properties of Exoplanets: Planet detection, Kepler, Nature of planets found so far (bad sound, but whatever!)
• Brains, Meaning and Corpus Statistics: Text statistics in, map of neural activity out!
• Getting in Shape for the Sport of Data  Science: Tools for data mining competitions, intro. to random forests
• Sugar: The Bitter Truth: Sugar is bad for you, it is a poison 
• "All Questions Answered" by Donald Knuth: Q&A 

I found that I read a lot less RSS feeds in my Google Reader. I also found that I consumed a lot less 'acquired' media in the form of US TV shows (selling the family media player helped here, no doubt).

I had a good time with this challenge and will attempt to stick to it and record my progress in a spreadsheet.