This is great. Blogging is great. I highly recommend blogging :)
But seriously: it has (good!) unintended consequences.
You start to feel more confident, because the act of writing blogs/tutorials will fill in the missing gaps in your knowledge.
People will start treating you like you know what you're talking about! Don't discount this. It feeds your confidence and causes a nice positive feedback loop, and also can lead to real opportunities (paid guest posts, jobs, consulting, etc). This is sort of unexpected and sort of counterintuitive. It's easy to look at the Twitter-famous devs and wonder how they got that way. Chances are, they got that way by consistently putting stuff out there that people found valuable. Could be open source software, but often it's combined with a significant amount of writing helpful stuff.
I'm a big fan of having your own platform. Facebook, Twitter, Medium... they're great for getting the word out, but they own the traffic and the readers. I suggest posting to your own site first, and syndicating content ("importing it") to Medium, dev.to, etc.
The other huge benefit to owning the platform is you can build up an email list, and stay in touch with your readers. When you get an email from someone saying how much your post helped them, got them unstuck after days of struggling, made a concept clear in their mind... that's an awesome feeling. It's huge for motivation, too.
I love the meta-advice from this article: that you can reuse content in multiple forms :) Turn your talk into a blog post. Turn a popular blog post into a talk. Or a podcast, or a video (series, even). Or a tweet thread. Sky's the limit!
This is great. Blogging is great. I highly recommend blogging :)
But seriously: it has (good!) unintended consequences.
You start to feel more confident, because the act of writing blogs/tutorials will fill in the missing gaps in your knowledge.
People will start treating you like you know what you're talking about! Don't discount this. It feeds your confidence and causes a nice positive feedback loop, and also can lead to real opportunities (paid guest posts, jobs, consulting, etc). This is sort of unexpected and sort of counterintuitive. It's easy to look at the Twitter-famous devs and wonder how they got that way. Chances are, they got that way by consistently putting stuff out there that people found valuable. Could be open source software, but often it's combined with a significant amount of writing helpful stuff.
I'm a big fan of having your own platform. Facebook, Twitter, Medium... they're great for getting the word out, but they own the traffic and the readers. I suggest posting to your own site first, and syndicating content ("importing it") to Medium, dev.to, etc.
The other huge benefit to owning the platform is you can build up an email list, and stay in touch with your readers. When you get an email from someone saying how much your post helped them, got them unstuck after days of struggling, made a concept clear in their mind... that's an awesome feeling. It's huge for motivation, too.
I love the meta-advice from this article: that you can reuse content in multiple forms :) Turn your talk into a blog post. Turn a popular blog post into a talk. Or a podcast, or a video (series, even). Or a tweet thread. Sky's the limit!
That Twitter idea is awesome! Thanks!! I definitely have done the conference talk re-config though!