Hi – this is a guest post by Giles Bowkett. I made at least $10,000 in the last few months selling videos on my personal blog (including at least $5,000 selling a video about how to have a terrific programming career, and at least $5,000 selling a video about how to sell videos on your blog).

As crazy and hucksterish as this might seem, I’m not the only one. PeepCode, the Pragmatic Programmers, RailsEnvy, ThinkCode.tv, and Codeulate all sell Ruby-related screencasts; Rubyists selling Ruby-related ebooks include Jeremy McAnally, former Rails Activist Mike Gunderloy, Marc-André Cournoyer, the husband-and-wife team of Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy, and, if you go back as far as 2006, DHH himself, and 37Signals as a whole (who made $120,000 in one month selling a PDF off their blog, and in the process sparked a debate with Tim O’Reilly about whether traditional publishers still had any value at all – a debate somewhat ironic in the context of this year’s new, traditionally-published 37Signals book, Rework). Read More

Giles Bowkett – Ruby Inside’s Top Presenter of 2008 – contributes a guest post:

I created a 90-minute video called How To Get A Kickass Job, Making Six Figures Working (From Home) With The Stars Of Your Community, Even If You Just Got So Fired That The Cops Hauled You Out Of The Building In Handcuffs. Part of my magic formula includes understanding Google PageRank, and the best way to understand complex, abstract mathematics is to reduce them to a very short Ruby script. As an aside, you’d be surprised how many complex, abstract theoretical thingamajigs can condense down to just a few lines of easily understandable Ruby. Read More