When I was between regular jobs and fully focused on AppDetails, it was suggested that I might create content for an eLearning site that was seeking technical training content. I agreed but very quickly found myself in a full-time position again. But I had signed a contract to create the content, so was forced to “make the time”. A few nights and a few weekends got me to a point where I had created what you’ll find here. Upon delivery, I was frustrated to hear that the site that had contracted the material was shutting down the eLearning services and had canceled all contracts with authors.

How to make the most of the effort? Could I leverage it to kick-start some community activity at AppDetails? That was my hope. AppDetails was getting decent traffic, and I got positive feedback regularly. However, starting a new community is a real challenge in this day and age. Long ago, people would routinely seek out specialty forums for targeted discussions. Today, a few very large platforms like Reddit, X, and LinkedIn have enough adoption to be suitable for discussions on most topics. Further, convincing people to take part in a community in its early stages is also an uphill battle. Nobody wants to participate in a conversation or make contributions where conversations and contributions are not already occurring. Even AppDeploy took years to get rolling, but competing services make communities like AppDetails that much harder to hit critical mass.

Initially, I decided to make this training available on AppDetails for 100 activity points. Almost every activity performed on AppDetails awarded points and helped contributing members to stand out as leaders. Further, it encouraged some competition and even made participating a little fun. Taking this concept further than I had with my ITNinja project, these points could be transferred to other members (to say thank you or show special appreciation), and such points could be used to collect rewards.

However, with AppDetails shutting down, I decided to rebrand the slides and edit it to post as a Juriba blog post. So it is now freely available on YouTube, with no registration necessary.