Saying Hello To The Newest .NET Community - WeAreDotnet!

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to Code with Stu channel. Today I'm joined by a very special guest, Tim from WeAreDotnet. Hello Tim, how's it going? Hey, thank you for having me. Not a problem. So the reason why we're here today on a kind of a special live stream is Tim and a couple of friends of his are building a brand new .NET community and I think you guys deserve to know about it. So Tim, could you tell us a little bit about this community and kind of what it set out to achieve? Yeah, totally. So WeAreDotnet.io is, well the idea, let me go a little bit in the past because that helps to understand what we're doing. So a little bit over a year ago, Matthias, the co-founder of WeAreDotnet.io, actually created a GitHub repository which was called I think .NET Creators or .NET Creator Card, something like that. So he pretty much collected JSON files for a ton of .NET

content creators and connected collected data like their YouTube channel, their RSS feeds, stuff like that. But it was just sitting there in GitHub. So you could, and I think he also had an OPML file which made it easier to consume all the feeds, but that was basically it. And at some point I found it and I was like, hey we actually need to be able to, we can do more than that. And I was like, hey let's turn that into a website. And that's pretty much what we did. So we took all the data he had and based on that we created WeAreDotnet.io. But we didn't just import all this data, but reached out to the people and asked them, hey we're creating that new portal, do you want to have your content there? And we basically aggregate a ton of RSS feeds, YouTube channels, and make all that available under one platform. So right now we have 170 different people bringing content to the platform and we want to turn that into like a healthy .NET

community pretty much. Nice. Not only are we joined by Tim, we are also today joined by Gerald. Hello Gerald! Hello, hello! I was just figuring out how you do the cool little, what is it, bio thingies. I did see that before. Hi, sorry, yeah, awesome. So Gerald, what's your kind of involvement with the WeAreDotnet community so far? Tim's just given us a little brief overview of kind of like the community. How do you fit into the picture so far? Yeah, Tim and Matthias kind of like forced me to do this. No, I'm just kidding. So for the people who don't know who I am, my name is Gerald. I live in the Netherlands and I work remotely for Microsoft on the .NET MAUI team. And before that I was a Microsoft MVP, very active in the community. I still am. So you know, I have a big love for everything that is community and of course .NET and Microsoft. So I am in the unique position to kind of like get the best of both worlds and involve myself in both. And this is of course an amazing initiative that I loved immediately, so I jumped on board. And .NET MAUI, for the people who are not aware, is a Microsoft UI framework to build cross-platform apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS, based on C#.

net so we have this amazing website now WeAreDotnet and I thought how cool would it be to you know use my own technique my own framework that I'm working on um build an app so that I know you know what people are hitting when they're building apps um and at the same time hopefully provide a amazing app that also shows the same content as WeAreDotnet and we have an amazing app together with that as well so that's kind of how I got involved it was just a wild idea um it's you know testing the very very much Alpha stage right now maybe if we get a little crazy I can show you a little bit um and then Matthias and Tim said like hey you know um we have this Discord server um maybe you want to help out with some operation there so I'm kind of like you know enrolled in the team a little bit doing some things here and there and that's basically how I got involved nice very nice so it sounds like then you guys have got quite a lot going on already you've got a website you've got a Discord server you've got an app kind of where is this heading because this looks like it's getting a lot of traction very very quickly yeah it's it's it's really uh crazy what's going on right now I mean uh literally two weeks uh two months ago nothing existed like I think the very first GitHub commit was literally two months ago and uh a little bit more than a month ago the page went live um and we had the first few people on there I think we started with like 20 people when we put the Page live and then we quickly rented up to 100 creators and now we're at 170 with more than one thousand two hundred you that I think right now it all pretty much happened in an incident uh I was even contacted by the net Foundation because they really really loved what we do um yeah I think you've been part of Planet Xamarin before yes yeah that's right um so plan examine was was kind of like for our so again uh I I'm just not gonna assume that anyone has any knowledge of the whole history here Don and Maui before was known as xamarin um also same concept build cross-platform apps based on C sharpen.

net examined was a standalone company startup was acquired by Microsoft and now you know we're taking the next step um in incorporating this solution into. net and getting rid of the examine name and branding but there has been a very active community and there still is um and we kind of like started our own vr. net but very specific to xamarin which was called planet xamarin with planetexamine. com I think it's still live maybe it is um and that wasn't Okay cool so that was an aggregator for all kinds of blogs it started with blogs later came some podcasts and YouTube channels um for people who were creating content around xamarin and it has been very popular there was a Twitter account Associated to it uh which you know uh just just spit out all the new blog posts that were published so I guess with all the API changes we're not paying um 42 000 Euros a month to do that so I guess that stopped working um so uh you know that was going on there and yeah I think you Tim were in touch with James montemakno who is a well-known name uh together with examin and .NET MAUI and dotnet now um to talk about how to transition also the Planet Xamarin content to vr.

net right yeah not not even that like I met James before on a conference um and I pretty much just reached out to him to tell him about WeAreDotnet like hey did you see that what do you think about it stuff like that um and he pretty much responded saying oh here I really like that we did something similar with submarine only uh and let's talk pretty much and the basic idea is that um and we already did a lot of that to sort of carry over the old content from planet submarine and incorporate that into WeAreDotnet and that's something that already happened because the people behind Glenn summary had the idea for something I think that it was called planet. net or something that just never happened and and we just pretty much did what they had in mind because there was just the evolution of things to move from uh xamarin only to like the whole. net ecosystem no so I must admit um Maui is definitely on my list of things to to learn one of my close friends is working with it quite now and he seems really impressed um with like generally how it works so you know gonna kind of sneakily ask the question is any of like the uh we are done that platform because there's quite a few bits to it um now is any of that going to be open source so we can kind of sneak a quick peek because eight different bits and pieces yeah it definitely will be um my plan always was to have an open source at some point to actually have to take in contributions um I just wanted to get out of beta State sort of and have like a robust base and then make it public and people can actually share contributions because well it's all based on Azure we have right now there's I think three different app Services uh terms of API endpoints and I want to make sure it's all robots no one can do any harm with the code being public um I'd want to make sure it's all running fine and then we actually make it public yeah yeah no that that absolutely makes sense that approach and I think a lot of things would follow uh kind of that kind of path so obviously it's taking off like a rocket ship um I found out from uh matthias's feed and that's kind of how I found value guys in general but like anything uh any kind of rocket ship has its kind of challenges in in building and growing have you had any challenges kind of so far well not not so far there's been a couple of minor things really I mean um you would think that RSS feeds are sort of similar and you quickly realize no they are not not at all um there's huge difference around like date format for example we just had a discussion the other day in the Disco Channel because everyone has different date formats in their in their feeds some people have the date published and some people only set the date updated and the publish date is min value so there's quite a few uh if and switches to pass all the Feats really that's pretty much the the toughest thing we had to solve for now um obviously there's there's one thing with with scaling um I have no idea if like if if we continue to scale right now there might be some issues we have to have to fix pretty much nice hopefully you'll have a a nice big team of content creators that can kind of help you out with some of those challenges hopefully yeah they already do some of them yeah it's really lovely yeah nice uh that's really good so you've mentioned kind of RSS feeds there um what kind of content and kind of stuff is there like I think it'd be it'd be good in a minute to kind of get your walk through and yeah what you're planning to do and that kind of stuff uh let me see if I can turn my screen here [Music] what's it doing uh I want to have this green here so I hope you can see my screen no you can now they can yeah that works nicely okay so um basically the content we have comes from right now at as I said 170 creators um they all have their own uh special areas in the net ecosystem there's some people who like write blocks or code about generic t-sharp.

net courses and there's people with um like posts about Entity Framework uh Azure things there is some really some things which are like this one year microservices or the uh domain event which is not 100 related to. net but it's important for the net developers as well so we said okay let's let's keep it for now um in general we have the we've split that into like some of the categories we have um we even have some some F sharp stuff we have some some posts about just just Visual Studio itself like how to use Android immunizing business will all that so we pretty much cover the whole. net ecosystem and I used to refer to it as. net and friends because like Azure for example isn't necessarily. net but you need to know how to deploy an app service how to to maybe run an SQL server or whatever so Azure is definitely related to. net development uh and like we have code extensions I think we have a couple posts about that are sort of related to.

net as well so we always say hey Dot net entrance in that regards all right so I noticed there you've got a and I think it's under the the resources that you've got an RSS feed is that an RSS feed of RSS oh yeah no technically not so we have these these three hours at feet right now um that's pretty much the same content you have on the on the landing page um just that you could say hey I wanted I want it all or I only want videos or I only want blog post but it's pretty much the landing page content um Planet Xamarin back then actually aggregated RSS feeds so they were just taking in hours as feeds and putting it all together technically we are not aggregating things because we are reading all the hours as seeds um downloading stuff putting it in an SQL database like not the content as such but the title description uh they published and stuff like that so we actually have data in the database and we create our own feeds from that because that gives us a lot more flexibility than compared to actually just aggregating seats yeah I think we were talking about this um the other day in Discord around one of the the problems of how to differentiate some of the higher volume creators and maybe some of the Lesser known creators yeah one one thing that for me is really important and one of the things one of the reasons why I started that thing is um I was looking for something I actually can't remember what it was I think it was some some Entity Framework topic I don't know um I found that guy really loved his video watched it all and then realizing I actually never seen that guy before he didn't have many many followers and then you realize hey it's actually quite tricky to find people like on LinkedIn yeah you occasionally see someone maybe you see someone on Twitter um but it's it's tough to find like good people in the net ecosystem because um yeah there are a couple of people with like huge amount of followers and you you typically find them really fast uh like uh Nick what's his name Nick chops us Nick whatever yeah so there are a couple of people you find you stumble upon them quite fast um but some of the creators we have I think it's really tough to find content from them if you're just searching on Google or whatever because they don't have a ton of followers they they don't have a lot of people on LinkedIn following them so all the algorithms inside Twitter LinkedIn whatever make it really tough to find stuff from them and we wanted to have the platform platform that doesn't have all that so everyone is treated the same really um with the only exception that we and I think that that's what you've been referring to we are thinking about giving especially people who don't have a lot of followers who might only have like two or three posts who just started we thinking about giving them a little boost sort of to appear more often in the feed to make it easier for them yeah I'm I'm fairly supportive of this um you know I know the likes of Milan and Nick and they've done great things in the community but you know it's finding those new upcoming creators who have lots of good ideas have you know lots of different approaches to stuff I think really bring some uh some really good diversity into into the community as a whole if it was gone yeah no I wanted to add like some of them especially some of the younger ones have really really great high quality content it's just hard to find I'm glad that's a problem that you guys are going to solve um I'm really really happy for that personally so if you are a kind of like a new content creator or an even an existing content creator like kind of how do you get started and like how do you get yourself into this community yeah that's actually really simple well all you have to do is sign up to the page once um sign up we use GitHub about our authentication providers we just have to sign in ones to the page um and we actually have a GitHub account um and we have our repository here the.

net create account Repository and you pretty much just has to send us a pull request with your card um we call them cards I can show you why we call them cards and it's a pretty uh simple format really we have uh channels we have feeds um in channels you can give us any any website anything you you consider a channel where you post things might be a LinkedIn profile some people send in their twitch profile or your website or your YouTube channel whatever and in thieves you just give us our seats for your content currently um all we have is either YouTube feeds or blog posts so uh whatever people use for blogging but that's what we have what we have right now and soon Niche sort of we want to add podcasts as well nice yes and then just from a newbies perspective this is is this all free or do I have to pay anything for it no it's everything is completely for free so we you don't have to pay any anything it's completely free and we want to keep it that way and um yeah no yeah but Tim you're too too modest um there is the sponsoring enabled on the vr.

net GitHub so you know if you can miss something if you want to sponsor this initiative there's multiple ways to do it one way is sponsoring through the GitHub organization right here so I think that will go to like all uh there is some stuff obviously costing money through the hosting and um some things going here of course the most valuable thing that you can't replace with money um your free time that you're spending here the merchandise that Tim is showing uh oh and Stu too oh my gosh I'm I'm so under addressed um so there's there's awesome stuff going on here so if there's one thing that you want to do um go check out the sponsor page for vr. net on GitHub and you can support them that way as well so yeah thank you um that that brings me to one important Point like um when we started all that I was talking to Matias and and we said um we don't want to turn that into the next job portal company page whatever because there's thousands available we also don't want to use like um Google ads or something that's just not us we don't want that however yeah as you said you know there are things like this is pretty much uh you could say a normal uh software as a service application like based on all the services we we need to do that we are using uh like Azure cognitive search behind the scenes we have a couple of app services on Azure um a couple of licenses to pay for for other things we use so um there is like builds we have to pay obviously um which get more and more expensive the more and more the community growth we are in in we're having conversations with a couple of people um we said we we would never use Google ads but we might um like if there's a company we didn't talk to them but just as an example uh Sim Fusion they they offer.

net control they offer a lot for for net developers uh if they say hey we if you put an ad for us on the page yeah we might consider doing that so if it if it's an ad that is something 4. net developers yeah we would maybe you think think about that but that's as far as it ever goes sort of nice it sounds like you're you're approaching it in a way that a lot of people will resonate with you know trying to really sell them anything it's it's a resource for the community essentially by the community as well um it's great to know about the sponsorship enabled as well I assume that's going to be probably point a for a lot of people alongside the great swag that you got on the store as well um so in terms of like following along with the development of the community um you know kind of how do I is what I think it was quite handsome in terms is the Dark Matter developers the people they are doing the daily grinding in the software houses how do they stay up to date with kind of like what your plans are so I could pick a random example you might want to do a virtual conference in you know yeah I mean as I said we pretty much only started uh like uh Matthias and me had some funny brainstorming sessions really and we thought oh let's see how where it goes maybe we have uh via.

net conference at some point or we are not net Meetup at least um I think that's all things that will happen because that totally makes sense um I just no idea when really uh it definitely will happen we also want to include people a lot more on the things we are working on because after all we said that's a community thing and we definitely want to talk to the community about the features and decisions as well it totally makes sense to join the Discord server because in there we will do some announcements uh maybe run some polls stuff like that so people can actually be involved in the way we continue with the platform nice that's that's perfect I the one question I wanted to ask probably more aim towards Gerald actually um we mentioned talking about kind of the the Maui app that you're you're kindly building for the community is that going to follow the same kind of features and stuff like that that the website has or you planning to do anything kind of special in there yeah so that's actually one of the things that I'm struggling with right like um before I joined Microsoft to work on xamarin forms now done in Maui I I was working on these kinds of apps um which is now almost four years ago so it has been a while um and all even back then I would always work with with someone else or designers or whatnot so you would have some kind of input and at least different kind of um angles of how to look at something right and it was more business apps as well so it would be a little bit more clear on what the user wanted to do how to arrange things um so yeah that's that's one of the kind of like struggles that I have right now like um what you see on the website the flow there doesn't necessarily make sense if you wrap it inside of a mobile app right you could you could do things a little bit different there um or or how you arrange things or you just have one of the most obvious things is you have much much less space right I have this big Ultra wide screen here you can fit everything on it and you can see all these Creator cards I think you owe us an explanation Tim why it's called cards or did you explain it no no I I actually didn't yeah so we called it cards because if you look at the Creator list for example it's all these these in this card format pretty much um and that's why why the repository is called.

net Creator card because every user on that platform has has a card like that um and not only you you not only creators but also also the users so when when you're on that uh when you sign up everyone has that card in here and that's why you say it's it's cards really and I guess that card format probably is is not too good for a mobile app yes and no right here you can see like there's a lot of like if we take the first one Anand I'm sorry if that didn't pronounce that correctly like there's a lot of white people right which which looks nice on the website and that makes sense because you can still see like seven other cards even a couple of the bottom ones there so that makes sense uh but if you do this in a mobile app then yeah you're going to show one card and a screen and you're gonna be like okay that doesn't tell me anything besides his name and that he has a GitHub account um so you know that that's that's like how are you gonna effectively show all these things and still uh have the feeling of the website so um to come back to your to your original questions to right now what I'm doing is crushing your thing in there just um having all the API calls getting all the data in there um definitely matching whatever we see on the website and I think you know together with Tim we have some numbers on like um hey what is the pages that are shown the most so that's obviously the things that we want to focus on and I think you know just getting the basics up and running just getting the app into the hands of people um is the first goal and then from there we're gonna see well I say we because I'm part of the team uh but one of the things that I want to see and together with the community uh that the app is already open source you can see the The Source there and help me out if that's what you want um I want to try and figure out um you know what makes sense and how we can leverage the uh unique capabilities of devices to make this app even better so one of the things obviously is like right now you know whenever you click on a link on a card for a Content you'll just go inside of the browser inside of the app and it will show the web page how cool would it be if you tap on a video and it will open the YouTube app or maybe show the video just inside of the app you can do picture and picture scroll while you're watching that video like that's cool things that you could do with these these these apps of course um but the first first focus is to just get all the things the important things from the website inside of the app and make it kind of like a you know instead of Doom scrolling over Twitter or blue sky um you can now scroll over useful content that will actually teach you something I think the only other important part is that um every every user uh well it has a knife let's call it profile on the page so no matter if you're a Creator or a user you have like a link tree you could call it that uh it gives you some nice GitHub stats well that's uh experimental that's what we call it so this this page will get overhauled it's just uh that's what we have right now so every uh person you look at uh tegloo for example you can you can see her feed for example in this case um she has some GitHub set and I think some people uh he may be oh uh because some people have some GitHub projects as well I actually can't remember no maybe myself I don't have a seat on there but I have projects on that so some people have had projects up where they list their uh yeah some of the GitHub project they're working on so it pretty much gives you a nice profile page which works as your link tree because it has all your Social Links but on top of that it gives people some more information about you like some GitHub sets some projects you're working on maybe a feed if you have one so it's actually more than just the content so it's really like a small community page nice and for those that are watching um I'll have all the links down in the description for all the stuff that's been shown today like the GitHub repositories and stuff so you don't need to dig around the internet and find it or it'll be done kind of 10 10 15 minutes after the stream or so um so how long has this taken to build because you've got quite a lot already and you said you started a quite a short amount of time to go get your hosting on Azure you're getting a Maui out Bill you've got a swag store already open that's quite a lot of work for not a lot of time no well I don't know technically it's not that much work really I mean uh if you work with with.

net core and and Entity Framework and all that stuff for years it takes you it's a matter of hours to get like the back end done for that I think most of the work is actually spent in the in the front end and that's a few JS app um I had a view template which I use for a couple of other websites so that made it easy to have like the basic layout done really I have a lot of I have lots of smaller controlled in view which make it really easy to put things together like the whole the whole top paid the top thing here I have all that pre-made I just have to like change change the CSS Styles a bit uh then it's a lot sitting in Photoshop getting getting like some some graphics done and stuff like that I think overall until we had the very first version online I think I've been working on it for like two weeks and and in the evenings only because I obviously have my my full-time job as well uh it's not too much work really for now I mean I'm I'm working on it literally every day and there's more and more features coming soon um and getting all these smaller features done now getting things fine-tuned getting things working properly at the beginning like synchronizing defeats was our manual work we triggered that like I was running that in debug in my video Studio code like filling in things in the database that's all automated now so at the beginning there was a lot less than what they say right now but there's also a ton of things happening behind the scenes which You Don't See one that's really really good to have that much done it's good that you get all these templates and stuff um as well so we're talking about kind of a little bit more around the future um you're kind of reminded me of something uh that I saw on Discord a little while ago um you've got a community event running or something in I think it's two weeks time off the top of my head um is that right can you share it like a few details yeah there's um so we want to do that really first um we call that uh I think I call it Community call uh ask me anything whatever and uh so we want to do that that's the very first one and then we probably want to do that I don't know every month or every two months or something like that where anyone can come ask questions it's going to be live on Discord um we will have some special guests like I will do this one with James montemagno I can say that because he approved that already but there's there might be other guests I don't know if I can name them right now so I don't do that um you'd be happy to see them so it's some nice nice people if they're gonna make it um and we want to do that sort of we want to be involved with the community we want to say hey we're here we're open you can talk to us uh because yeah obviously we are building that or I'm building a lot of that Matthias is doing a lot of things but we are not doing that for us like we said we don't want to earn any money with that if we ever get to a point where we have more money than we need we put things in no idea to spawn the other Open Source Products or whatever we don't do that for us we do that for the community and we want to have the community involved as much as possible that sounds really good um really great to hear that kind of thing because some people do it for the money um some people do it for a lot of other reasons but if everything that I've heard from you before the call and now on the call as well like really just sounds top class I have to give a shout out to matteus as well um obviously you can be with us here today otherwise you who would be he said he's gonna watch the live stream later on say hey um um the other thing I kind of noticed is I think you posted it the other day is it you've got quite a lot of um views that hit in your daily the website daily um I think you said it's like 1 500 I can't remember if it's page views or users visiting the site consuming the content that people are creating every single day um well it's it's heavily infinite it's heavily fluctuating so we had I think the peak we had was 1.

8 K unique visitors um the other day we only had like 700 it's it's shifting but it's quite a few people yes I think the hours the hours at feed alone uh is used around 800 times per day or something wow that's cool and other people coming from like just America or just UK or is it all over the world I saw a brief Glimpse on the the site there that there were a lot of flags that you're not necessarily familiar with in in interesting you ask uh or definitely I had a tweet uh a couple of days ago so I was running a couple of queries in the database because I wanted to know myself I only thought hey tons of countries let's see um right now we have uh as I said 100 1200 users from uh 129 countries so technically if you take all the countries the world have we already covered 70 of what wow that's a lot of people that impressed myself as well but I guess that that net really because.

net is is like used all across the world so it's only natural that people who are interested in. net content come from all across the world it's not a regional thing really well okay so a sneakerly behind the gun scenes just asked Gerald if you wouldn't mind uh showing us a bit of the app so far so let's have a look there it is and uh um yeah let's take a look at Maui for the well a few months this is my first Maui out that I'm looking at so well maybe maybe you've already been using it that you don't know right because it's still Native apps um anyhow so yeah here it is running on the iOS simulator um and if we kind of like maybe maybe it's nice to pull up like how does this work and this let's see if I can create a new browser window here WeAreDotnet the io I think I should be able to somehow put this side by side there we go all right see um so well here it's it's just responsive see this is one on one um I can just take this so no but you can see it it pulls up like the first page that you have um is like the the same content that you see here on the landing page right because this is it's about the community it's about the content primarily um so there's that that again anything might change here this is just mostly getting all the API calls to work actually pulling in data and and showing that off but this makes sense to me right just leading with the content right here um and all the things have like links between them so my machine is a little bit slow I noticed that so if there's any weird things here it's because of that probably and if you click on them like I said this is a Blog so this will just take you for iOS you have this concept of like an in-app browser kind of thing so it doesn't really take you through the Safari browser you still can by clicking on the button here on the lower right but primarily it will start in the app and you can just you know read a little bit here what this is about um and then you can go back with like the done button that you didn't really leave the app and you have to switch all the things over here you can just do this but if you go to a video like this very simply just goes to whatever URL is behind this right so now it will take you to YouTube um and kind of like the annoying thing is I actually I should see if I this also happens on like my actual um my actual device um because now you what you could see happening is like it asked me for like the cookie consent and that kind of stuff the Privacy stuff all the time so if that's something that happens with like the in-app browser because it doesn't really share the cookies with like the rest of the system I expect that the actual device if you're using that like daily that it shouldn't do that um but that would be very very annoying exactly the same happens on on Android like oh you okay it's a unique browser session I think it's using chromium internally but it's a unique browser session and you're not signed into anything you don't have cookies okay nothing so yeah that would be very annoying so how cool would it be like if you click on a video it takes you to the YouTube app where you have all your settings all your things that will be then much cooler um I think or maybe have a setting right I love settings I Love Options make a setting in the app that the user can set their preference whatever they want to have right um so we have this this is you know the primary thing that we have a second tab here which is called Community um so this is kind of like the same thing as you would go to um I think the creators thing here where did I go with this this doesn't do anything no yeah um but where is this oh is that on the main page but a little bit down then is that it no I actually we had that on the page actually removed it I removed I removed it yeah I moved the the counter to the uh to the menu so now it the count is there in the menu the new member list is there and I just okay didn't want didn't you walk away through yeah baseball yeah yeah so for the people not aware um these counters were like somewhere on the website here so that's why I kind of like took them uh and you could see the numbers right this was really cool like if you're building the app if you were working going to the website you would see each time that the numbers would go up so we have like users or members which is just you could just join with GitHub like Tim just explained and we have then the the people who really went through uh the GitHub repository and added themselves as a Creator and we're now past 170 as well so that's really cool right so I kind of like took that idea from the website as well you could see like the new creators uh you would have this kind of like more compact cards um you could scroll between them like hey what are the the new ones um so you could scroll through that the new users the new members that just joined so you can go through them and you can click on one of them right Lou I know Lou she's my good friend hello Lou if you're watching you could click that and you would get like the profile right so you could see everything that someone has filled in so if I would go to like the creators you would see kind of like the same thing this is also still work in progress there's a lot of stuff to cover here um but you could see you have that same profile picture I added the flag in here you can see the the Microsoft MVP so you could add if you're a Microsoft MVP or uh part of the WomenIn.

net or a veteran from the Planet Xamarin we have our own special badge as well uh so there's a couple of these batches get up stars um and you will you can see all of that you can see the same information here on the mobile app as well and then of course all the links to the socials that you can see here on the website um that again is by the way the same with the links I mean I guess it would be cool if clicking on Twitter would open the Twitter app clicking on on GitHub would open the GitHub app and so on yeah so right now again goes to the in-app browser takes you to the right profiles everything is a link and it will just do that but yes again that would be very cool if you would go to to the right app for this because especially like on LinkedIn you're not going to see anything right so this doesn't even work that's very annoying um so you know this is this is going on she doesn't really have have a bio Dashie this is a tagline oh you can see that here so that's the same thing here and I think there should be people with like a little bit more bio Tech stat would show as well and you can see the tags that someone has here they're not clickable right now but I think if you click on something here like C# and .

net no that only worked in the um in the creator of third right now um gotcha so that but that that's cool things right because the other thing that I'm working on right now it's now kind of hidden under the counters right here if you click on like the creators you will get the full list of creators um and you can start scrolling I implemented the um uh infinite scrolling as well so the more you go down uh the board will load and you can load to all 170 that are in here right now um you can see the little flag right here whenever you click one Kim philpot's good friend of mine as well um you will go back and and again land on this profile and inspect all of those things right so also like another thing that's that's not really working that's working on a website but not on mobile is like these things right if I hover over the MVP badge you can see this little tool tip not gonna happen on mobile right how are you going to Hoover the thing um so one idea that I have like this is not gonna mean something to to everyone right so how am I going to make clear and I'm pointing to this Planet Xamarin badge here uh so if I'll look at like if I'm gonna search for Kim Phil pods you could see a little bit clearer uh Kim um you can see like if you scroll if you hover over it it's gonna show you like hey this is a planned examine veteran which is super cool so how are we going to solve this right so maybe one thing is that if you tap on it um you could see a little dialogue with like hey this is what it means uh maybe you have a link to a little bit more information so that's all kind of like challenges that I have to deal with together with how do you do the layout right like he has only two socials but I can imagine like with coming in with blue sky and Mastodon and all the socials that are coming from everywhere right now like we're gonna have a bottom a a a load of icons here so this is already you can't see it but this already has like a scroll view attached so whenever there it gets too much you can like scroll through the side and you can reach them all so that's all things that that you have to take into account and which is fun challenges and then you know um Tim Tim is going so fast so I didn't even get to all the GitHub stats and all the other links and feeds and the one thing of the real the the way you you attach the flex to the Avatar looks actually pretty good and uh I realized when you're on the profile page the we don't have the country so we actually I need to have a way to do that as well yep see and that's what's really cool right like also now that I'm discovering like oh this thing moved from the website and that thing's going there um it's very much up and coming up and running um but you know we need a little bit of coordination and of course things are in in the startup phase things are going very fast and things need to settle out a little bit um but you know we're just having fun doing this at least I am and I'm learning a lot about my own product uh about this the school Community stuff so this is kind of like where I'm at right now um on the GitHub repo uh for the whole vr.

net stuff so I guess imagine that's GitHub. com WeAreDotnet yeah um like I said there is the the app is already open source um so you know if you want to familiarize yourself a little bit with um Maui go to the mobile app one there you can see what I've been doing so far um and and you know if you feel comfortable if you feel adventurous go come help me out it's been a while since I've seen GitHub in light mode I love light mode I'm not sure how you do that to be honest doesn't it like hurt the eyes at like 2 A. M there's no code at 2AM I have two young kids that's not gonna happen man I'm changing diapers at 2am okay fair enough um so is this app kind of like available for people to start using like is it on the app stores and stuff right now or is it just kind of a side note experience uh yeah I don't know Tim go ahead yeah no I wasn't it's probably not even a slight load experience yet I mean you totally can if you know your ways around that you can probably check out the source code and then just put it on your phone if you want to but the experience probably isn't there yet I mean that's the whole state of the app it's working it's fine you can use it um but as you noticed like we technically silicone that repeater because we're constantly adding new features um the GitHub section for example if there doesn't look that great there needs to be some some changes um we also have a ton more features in our head so basically one thing we want to do which is what I'm working on behind the scenes right now we want to allow people to create their own RSS feeds pretty much so you can say hey I want to create an RSS feed I want uh these five creators in there because that's what I read every day uh then you you can do that so you can create your own custom RSS feeds from selected creators on the page that's one thing we're working on for example and um yeah that's bits and pieces we change every day to make them look nicer what better so it's pretty much an ongoing thing right now nice now that would actually be a really great really great feature to implement I think that's one that I will definitely use don't get me wrong there's going to be loads of content I'm going to come back to the main page for um you know I might find one of the newer creators for example and want to read their stuff or watch their stuff as it comes out um so that will be from my personal point of view really really great um thing to go and implement so I kind of got a bit more of a trickier question for you um what's your favorite part of this so far for each of you like is it kind of like the reaction or building out a certain part of it but for me it's definitely building it because um well I used to be used to be work as a developer and also as a developer leader for I don't know 25 years um I think a couple well technically I work in marketing now I'm a developer of analyst for deeper I work in marketing I belong to the marketing department so in my daily job I don't do that much coding anymore and that's what I wanted for my daily job I wanted to do different things with my knowledge pretty much and code every time um but seeing that I'm still able to get something up and running that fast is like nice and I love to challenge myself with these things uh like I never never for example I never used um cognitive search before I just did it use it implemented it it's working nice probably not the way someone would implement it would use it use it daily it doesn't matter um yeah it's a challenge really and that I like like that nice and how about for you Gerald yeah so uh from a technical perspective I guess it's kind of similar like um the main thing for me again from the technical standpoint is I it's been for a year since I built a proper app right and in that time we transitioned from Xamarin.Forms to .

NET MAUI which is a whole different beat so um what I would really want for myself is to have an app uh to actually you know build it from the other side and see what our users are hitting what are the things that you run into um instead of you know looking at it from the framework side and coming up with all these cool things um instead of actually using it and then being like Oh okay from the framework perspective this makes sense but from a user perspective not so much right so that's very insightful for me but you know how it goes right you're gonna come up with some kind of funky idea for an app the to-do list the 100 million to-do list and you're not gonna stick with it right because it's not a real app it's not going to be used it's not going to be anything so this is a perfect thing right it has an API people are hopefully wanting this um it's a great use case to actually start building something so this was the perfect opportunity for me to start dog fooding as we call it our own technology and then start looking into that so from that like Tim said like I'm definitely doing the most of my time coding uh during my day job but this is a whole different thing right this is really helpful from for all kinds of things so that's one um and but for the entire project altogether um what I really like is like you have this big fragmentation right like um on Twitter sure there is this big Community but at some point you're gonna find Nick chapsis you're gonna find all the people that I just had in the app I still have it here so I have Kim philpots I have Jesse Liberty I have Leia Mars Reyes I have all these people I follow them they do great stuff but you're never really gonna find something new right you're always going to have the same set of people uh probably also inside of your own Niche like Tim is doing his Azure stuff his Entity Framework stuff I don't even know what you're doing um and I'm doing all my .NET MAUI stuff so I'm just gonna find these people and with this you're going a little bit broader but it's still like it's .NET friends like Tim put it I really like that um so you're gonna still find new people those new creators who want to grow uh Milan who's who just well he's doing great right he just overtook me on YouTube uh um but you know so you're gonna find these people um who are just you know gonna start off the journey they're gonna do amazing and I love Milan I love what he's doing um and and he's doing great right that's why his numbers are uh perfect and and you're gonna find a person like that and you're gonna be like hey I didn't know this he's doing interesting stuff this is really great so that's what I really love like you're bringing together this whole Community of.

net people from all uh places all around the world with all their own uh special uh specialization in their own little uh things within the .NET ecosystem um but still brought together in this this amazing platform I'm not even gonna call it a website I'm gonna call it a platform right so that's what I really like where where this is going especially I didn't know about the the do your own RSS feed feature um so I'm just gonna make this a big thing now this is going to be a killer feature Tim if we can uh we can create we we definitely will like it's it's work in progress right now working on it cool yeah nice I mean the one the one thing maybe to to finish that question the one thing that um impressed myself sort of is I actually learned quite a few bits about uh especially in that case about Entity Framework I didn't know before because I never looked it up I never used it and just while working on the page I've I've seen a video that the title sounded interesting I click on it I watch it I learned learn some something just pretty much while working on the product and I was like okay that was actually a really good idea because it helped me already and that felt great so and it seems like Stu I'll let you wrap this up from here but that's people uh that's why we see like the big numbers right people are waiting for these people want this um I think Tim you were immediately like James montemagno he's like the community manager I don't even know what exactly what he does nowadays but um he's very involved with the community as well he always has been and he immediately jumped on this and and I saw it shared internally as well so you know it also got the attention of Microsoft which is really great so there is really a kind of like need or ask for this and a lot of people are looking out for this and um yeah being enthusiastic about this so that's why you see the high numbers I guess and um why this is something that could become a really cool thing so looking forward to a bright future absolutely I think you you've kind of hit the nail on the head of like the whole future of the platform and also can't underestimate the timing of this especially with what happened with the I gotta call it a semi-collapse of Twitter um that was the default place where you would go and find stuff you'd look up your hashtags um that's where I found a lot of creators like Milan for example um who looks like he appeared out of nowhere on that platform yeah but then it all kind of took a bit of his outwears and some people started migrating over to Mastodon and then it all just kind of become really fragmented so I think the timing of this initiative is absolutely amazing and it's something that the community definitely definitely needs yeah um thank you I mean the the interesting part I I even learned to learn a few things about Twitter and Linkedin while working on that um you know that that we had that Creator group in LinkedIn where we had a couple of creators uh in in a private group so even in a private group in on LinkedIn there's some algorithms because not everyone in the private group was actually seeing my post except you really went into the group and looked for new stuff in the post in the group but you wouldn't see it in your feed so even though I thought like a just a normal time ordered list no and um yeah even even Twitter when you when you look at the last post we we did like there are tweets we did on Twitter which have like 20K Impressions and then the next tweet which is similar similar hashtags whatever only gets to like 2K and no one can really explain why okay that's that's definitely an algorithm at work there yeah um I don't envy you for the algorithmic challenge that's coming up to uh show newer creators and stuff to prevent that kind of problem in the future yeah um so yeah unless there's anything you guys uh want to add or or say or even plug for yourselves um I'm totally all good for that um it's very much appreciated you to spending your time coming on and having a chat with me this evening um very precious time out of your day and you know really really appreciate that and I'm sure the community appreciates that as And when they see this um thanks also to the viewers I've kind of come in and listened to us have a little chat for a little while it's very much appreciated um so yeah um any final words from you guys no I'm just grateful to be uh a little part of this Tim thank you for inviting me uh on you know a little bit on the team although I forced myself on it by just building an app and throwing it at you know what I really like what I really like like uh what we just talked about like you know the timing and stuff for like Twitter that kind of stuff this is also something that Microsoft can never create right we can put all the things out there we could be like oh we welcome the community we love our community and we really do right we mean every word of that but things like these need to come from the community right they know what what is needed what people want um this is not something that you can create as a company or at least it's very hard so it's always it's always like um like we all know without blaming anyone or whatever the history in that network uh from Microsoft it wasn't that great like the last couple of years were Ultra Ultra great it's all cool but the history wasn't and I think when people see a community when when this was uh would have been built by Microsoft people wouldn't like it just because it's done by Microsoft yeah yeah unfortunately um so no just grateful for this becoming a reality and and hopefully growing into something beautiful that everyone can uh can benefit from learn from and that's something that I really look forward to yeah awesome I think there's all that's left to say then from my perspective is make sure you go and sign up to the the website get yourself on the Discord get involved with the discussions and stuff um the team as you've just seen for the past hour I can't believe it's already been an hour I was generally worried before this that I would run out of things to like say and talk about for the hour um but you guys are amazing in the work you're doing is amazing so show them some support go and get yourself on on the website on on the Discord involve yourself in the conversation and once again thank you so much gentlemen for all your hard work and The Taste behind the scenes as well um you're definitely not forgotten um so yeah thank you very much and yeah I'll leave it there and I'll catch you guys on this channel hopefully in the next week or two watch out for more news cheers everyone thank you so much for having us