During the summer of 2009, Eric Berry began recording screencasts about Ruby and Rails similar to the screencasts at RailsCasts.com. He also invited other Rubyists to join him and provide recordings for the Ruby community. This is where I got involved. I did my first screencast for Teach Me To Code on Ruby on Rails Routing. This resulted in two things. First, I realized that recording wasn’t that tricky. Second, TechSmith sponsored my efforts by donating a license for Camtasia Studio for Mac and an AT2020 USB microphone.
Having been a longtime podcast listener and feeling empowered by the success of a screencast, I decided to start a podcast. I contacted Gregg Pollack and asked him about recording podcasts and got a lot of great advice from him about putting one together. In the process, I interviewed him as the first recorded episode of what became the Rails Coach podcast.
After a few more months, I had built a small community around the podcast. At the same time, Eric was becoming more interested Groovy and Grails and was focusing on other things related to his family and career. Recognizing that the majority of the audience at Teach Me To Code was Ruby and Rails developers and that his interested were taking him in the direction of Groovy, Eric asked me to take over providing the screencasts and managing the site.
I became the primary producer of screencasts in April 2010. Eric is still involved as a content producer. I combined the Rails Coach podcast and renamed it the Teach Me To Code podcast and incorporated a blog for articles in May 2010.
Eric has done an amazing job setting up systems such as the Disqus comments and UserVoice forum for suggestions. I have been extremely happy to move things along and keep the community and discussion alive.
