Achievement unlocked: One year of blogging. And now?

Beginning of last year I set myself the goal of running a tech blog, and writing one post every week.

This year is now over and according to the stats I wrote 54 posts. (I am pretty sure I skipped a couple of weeks during my holidays but immediately compensated)

What I liked at the beginning of this journey were the streak badges. It´s a small thing but sometimes they can give you the motivation to build the habit. Gamification is important! There should be more :-)
And I really appreciated the stickers Dev.to people sent me over Xmas. It was a nice suprise!

What now?

Am I going to stop blogging now that my goal has been achieved?

Definitely not.

Writing posts every week, allowed me to

• learn a lot
• consolidate my learnings
• give me the motivation to dig deeper into some topics

so I will definitely keep on putting my thoughts on paper even though I will probably loosen up a bit the schedule (maybe 2 posts a months) and more importantly focus on more technical posts ( either more tutorial like or simply snippet/tips like ) rather than philosophical/chatty ones.

Even though I noticed that technical posts get less traction I find them more useful as a reference for myself ( and others ) and as a picture of my growth path over time.

Learning in Public

Another thing I want to focus on is Learning in Public. One of the reasons why I wrote few Technical Posts was that I did not feel worth it. I thought that to blog about something I should be the expert on that topic. But I realized that:

• there are different level of expertise out there, and what could be very shallow/simple for me ( now ) could be difficult to grasp for someone that just started, so it could be beneficial for someone if I put my 2cents there as well.
• while writing an article about something that I tried out, or I am learning, I need to research a bit more and make things even clearer for myself, and if I wrote something wrong or silly or that I simply misinterpreted from the docs, I can be corrected by the readers (scary but useful!).

And anyway, even if the post will just a quick note for myself - for something I never really memorize ( like this ) it´s more useful and handy than the huge messy word file where I used put links to interesting articles, snippets and all sort of unordered things, plus:

• It's very nice when you google for something you don't remember.. and you find your own post.

if someone at work asks you a question about testing a react component, then maybe you can share your answer in a public gist on GitHub and send it to your co-worker as well as twitter Kent C. Dodds

• It's very handy when some colleague, asks something you just learned, did, or that you only know in your team, to post a link in slack ( i am not saying to refuse to help or to explain, it's just some more documentation to start with and it is DRY:

You have a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die. Scott Hanselman

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If you want to know more about Learning in Public you can check out the video here and all the source links Gift Egwuenu posted.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Comments

[Razvan Ilin]

Wow, this is quite an achievement, congrats! Feeling inspired now 💪 I started a series as well, mainly to consolidate my learnings and get better at writing. Did you have any issues with keeping the consistency going? I'm curious if this year of blogging helped you out with becoming consistent easier in other aspects other than blogging.

[Davide de Paolis]

Hi, thanks for your comment. No. did not really have consistency problems, I am pretty disciplined ;-) . was just sometimes harder when preparing for vacations or just came back from holidays - but in such cases, I tried to prepare a bunch of articles for the weeks I knew I was not able to write.
Yes, I believe blogging, in general, gives you a lot.
It structures your thoughts, your learning, it improves the way you communicate, could also give you extra skills ( try to make the content look nicer - searching for pics, editing them - etc) and make you more consistent in the way you solve issues or learn something.
Have a good journey through it!

[Rolf Streefkerk]

I'm on the same path this year to get 52 blogs posts out. Congratulations on actually achieving it!

[Davide de Paolis]

thanx. well. I checked your posts and ... are very very good ( long and detailed). I guess such post take way more time to write.
Good luck with your streak . definetely following you now! :-)

[Rolf Streefkerk]

Thanks, got a lot of work to do still before I manage what you did. Cheers