Behind the Scenes: Organization, Processes, & Testing Room Updates (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

I feel like we're finally getting some level of control back after months of nonstop reviews. We're making a lot of organizational changes and other behind-the-scenes updates to try and improve processes. Just to give you a look at the past couple weeks, we hit Thanksgiving with the usual Black Friday / Cyber Monday buyer's guide content, which is a lot of work, then ran into the 3060 Ti and 6900 XT reviews. I went in for a surgery for an old injury on the same day as the 6900 XT review went up, then was back in the office the next day to work on Cyberpunk content. The team has been burning through content hard, and this past 10 days or so, I finally personally hit a period where I wanted to back off the throttle a little bit. That's why, for the first time in probably a few years, we actually skipped several video uploads to the main channel. It was good for the team. The rest of the team has off for several more days, then Andrew will come in and work with me on the Disappointment PC build next week. I'm working on just catching-up now and feel good about work after having had about a week of low publication output. We'll probably take a break like that once a quarter, just because it does help to sort of re-evaluate what projects are active and finish some of them.

We have a new-hire starting in January, but it's someone that a few of you may remember from old, old videos. Patrick Stone (not to be confused with Patrick Lathan) has been working with me on-and-off for about 8 years. He was the first person I tried to hire back in ~2014-2015, but we just didn't have the ability to make it work at the time. Andrew ended up being the first hire, which worked out great, clearly, and then Patrick and Keegan came on full-time. Everyone here, including Patrick Stone (or just "Stone," as we call him, to avoid confusion with the many other Patricks) has now been working with me in some capacity for about 8-9 years. Keegan the longest -- he started at no pay and just free travel. That was the arrangement back when we were mostly a website, and he'd help me report on esports events and gaming conventions. At some point along the way, he was handed a camera and asked to help guard the tripod while I filmed something on a show floor. We eventually started making money, so he started doing contract work while attending school. Andrew came on board, then Patrick, and then Keegan has been our full-time video editor and camera operator for about a year, but we've all known each other for a long time. I actually know all three of these guys from high school, and Patrick Stone is another that we know from the same era.

Anyway, I'll write-up a separate thing about Stone shortly and will likely have him join me on camera in a main channel video as an introduction. He's got over a decade of computer engineering education experience, he has network engineering experience, and a lot of knowledge in key areas where I'm limited. The goal is to start doing some more educational content. He actually wrote the NVIDIA Ampere architecture deep-dive that we published (as a video) a few months ago, so if you saw that video, you already know his quality is high.

That's some behind-the-scenes for you. TLDR, I'm feeling pretty good after about 7-10 days of low content uploads. The team will be back in next week after a long break, but I'll be uploading content that we already completed in the meantime. Thanks for the patience!

- Steve