Blogging for busy programmers

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2 Blogging for busy programmers Andrzej Krzywda This book is for sale at This version was published on This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and publishers with the Lean Publishing process. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress ebook using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do Andrzej Krzywda

3 Contents Who is your audience? The Past You The Current You Your current team What s an audience? Watering Holes Safari - finding topics from watering holes How to keep yourself motivated for blogging? Remember why Track your progress and have a reminder Timebox and reward Remember about your other dreams The easiest posts to write for a programming blog

4 Who is your audience? It s good to know who your readers are. How to define your audience? Who are your writing for? The Past You If you re in doubt, write for the Past You. You are a programmer. One year ago you were also a programmer. One year ago, you didn t have all of the knowledge that you now have. Explain this knowledge to the Past You. Many programmers are at the stage where you were X years ago. Write for them. The Current You If you just did something non-trivial, explain it to yourself in a written form. When you need to do it again, this will be a great tutorial. Who knows The Current You better than you? Your current team You are already communicating about some programming ideas. It happens within your team. It may be part of your daily conversations in the office or it may happen in the Slack channel. You may consider duplicating what you have said to your team and putting it on your blog. You may also prefer to do it only on the blog. In both ways, you not only get your team attention, but also many other people benefit from it.

5 Who is your audience? 2 What s an audience? What do you call yourself? Are you a Ruby programmer? A Rails programmer? Both? A JavaScript programmer? A backend Java programmer? All those names make good audiences. They re perfect, as they re based on technologies you already know. Write to the audience you belong to. Don t write to JavaScript developers, if you re a Ruby programmer. Focus on Ruby programmers. Knowing who your audience is gives you the benefit of researching this audience better. You can learn what bothers them. What do they think of recent Hacker news? Do they love Apple or hate them? Do they love testing or are sceptical? How to learn more about an audience? You need to find their Watering Holes. Watering Holes A watering hole is an online place where your audience gathers, talks to each other, shares knowledge. In most cases those are forums. Example watering holes for a Ruby programmer: reddit/rails reddit/ruby rubyflow twitter - follow all the Ruby celebrities, as they tend to discuss with each other github repos for popular projects Hacker News

6 Who is your audience? 3 Sometimes a watering hole is not technology specific. That s the case of Hacker News. However, it s still a good place to look at, because many people from your audience are already there. Safari - finding topics from watering holes Once you know the Watering Holes, you can start your research. Look at the active threads of discussions. What makes people talk to each other? What do they look for? What do they have problems with? All of that are potential blog post topics. This process is called Safari. You watch the animals in their original environment. It s worth noting that the terms - Audience, Watering Hole, Safari - are coined by Amy Hoy. Follow her writing, attend her 30x500 class, if you want to become an expert in this topic.

7 How to keep yourself motivated for blogging? You got your programming blog, but you don t blog too much? You don t feel like doing it? What can you do about it? Remember why There is a reason why you started or want to start blogging. Write it down and remember why you are doing something, what you are doing it for. It might be: you want to change a job, you don t like your team, you don t enjoy working with, you want to work in a better team, more experienced or in a different technology you get nicely paid but your work is boring, blog is a way to escape it for a little time and do something more interesting, something different you want to get your first programming job you want to speak at programming conferences travel around the world be recognized as an expert, as a valuable member of your programming language community you need clients as a freelancer you want to start a programming agency, have your own team you want to help other developers write better code and stay connected with them

8 How to keep yourself motivated for blogging? 5 Whatever your goal is, remember about it. There is something you are trying to achieve here. There is a dream you have. Don t forget the dream. For me this is Independence. I like to organize my time, my tasks and doing things that I like ;) Without anyone telling me what to work on, how fast, in which way. This drives me. When I remind myself why I am doing what I am doing, why I am blogging, recording, writing a book, coding right now, it gives me a boost. There is more energy and less apathy. Track your progress and have a reminder Say you want to deliver 20 blog posts in a year. Around one every second week. Set up a reminder in Trello or Google Calendar or printed calendar, whatever you use. It s important for you to see a scheduled block of time for writing or a deadline for delivery. Timebox and reward You need to find your style of work. Do you like to schedule an hour or two, focus on a single task and be done with it? Is that your style? Or do you prefer to work in many smaller chunks of work? Here is one technique that I sometimes use: watch a Netflix episode (usually 30-60m) spend 10-30min on blogging watch another Netflix episode optionally spend time on blogging again

9 How to keep yourself motivated for blogging? 6 It works for me because: usually after a single episode I am already more relaxed and less tired to deliver something I know I won t be blogging (which requires mental energy) for long. I timebox it. I anticipate a reward, the next episode is waiting for me. I gave myself permission for it. In other days I use a different technique. I schedule a dedicated twohour block of time and I immerse myself in writing. Find out what works best for you. Remember about your other dreams The number 1 reason I am lazy and I don t want to do anything, including writing a blog-post? Not enough joy. I sometimes forget to have fun myself during a whole week. It happens sometimes when we chase our goals and dreams but we don t appreciate what we have, we don t stop to notice and use what we already achieved. It s the routine killing us. You know the drill: Wake up Get ready Commute to work (if you are not lucky to work remotely) Give your best for 8 hours (+ lunch) Come back Take care of house, kids, dishes, everything Have 0 remaining energy for anything.

10 How to keep yourself motivated for blogging? 7 What s the recipe? Only one thing works for me. Consciously scheduling time for joy. Remembering what I like and doing it. I grouped my favorite activities into a few categories: physical soccer carting snowboard biking intellectual learning more about programming reading about brain finding out more about sales science-fiction books emotional hearing spiritual vegetarian meditation buddhism open-source visual computer games cinema kinesthetic cooking computer games audio exploring new music on Spotify social board games cinema with friends multiplayer computer games coworking

11 How to keep yourself motivated for blogging? 8 I noticed that often I don t balance those activities properly. For example, I like learning more about programming and sales, I always have a few books about these topics around myself. But sometimes it feels that I am forcing myself to read them. On the other hand, when I started listening to an SF book, I finished 17 hours of audio material in a few days. I just forgot that I enjoy a different topic and a different medium. This happens to me more often than I would like to admit. We love doing something and we forget about doing it. We forget to schedule time for joy and remaining sane. We forget we are more complex and enjoy variety. We default to the same way of resting such as: playing computer games reading books binge watching tv shows reading programming news or Facebook because it usually works. Perhaps because it worked for so many years on us. But at some point, it often loses its magic. Yes, you enjoy the TV show but only when the episode is great, not average. And frankly, because of recommendations, it is easier to find historically good TV-shows and movies and hard to find fresh ones which are up to your taste. Art is strange in that way. You can use IMDB and other platforms to watch top 100 or top 250 best movies and enjoy them a lot. But then anything next is just not so good :) For me and computer games, it was hard to enjoy anything after The Witcher 3. So last week I was like fuck it. I gotta do something different, go somewhere different and break my habits. I scheduled 2-hour ride to a different city, spending half a day in an aqua-park and enjoyed water sliding like a baby. The next day it was ice skating.

12 How to keep yourself motivated for blogging? 9 I noticed that I often tend to focus too strongly on intellectual ways of having joy, which can be extremely hard after hours of coding, instead of social and/or physical. It s good to have goals, it s good to want to improve, be better at coding, find a better place, support your family. But when we forget about joy, when we only feel guilty about not working, not doing more, we lose a lot. Especially we lose motivation. I noticed that surprisingly when you give yourself more slack, more freedom, you come more energized to your goals and challenges. Sometimes the real answer is to forget about blogging, do something different that you love and come back later. I know it sounds trivial. That s why I tried to provide specific examples how I can completely screw it up.

13 The easiest posts to write for a programming blog Here are the 4 easiest types of posts that you can write about on your programming blog: View on YouTube, also attached in ZIP 1 The purpose of this list is not for you to always write easiest posts. But to know that not every post needs to be a bible, guide or very deep dive in. Shorter forms are welcomed nicely in programming communities and does not require tremendous amount of time to read. They have their own, valuable place in your blogging style. Especially at the beginning of your blogging journey when you are not an expert yet. And especially when you want to build a habit and keep writing regularly, but you don t feel inspired or don t have the time for anything very long. I wanted to elaborate a bit more about show some code and explain 1 ]

14 The easiest posts to write for a programming blog 11 technique presented by Andrzej in the video. I want you to remember, it does not need to be your code. Sometimes you don t feel inspired by the code you wrote recently in your daily work. Don t force yourself. Think about your favorite gem, package, library. Go to github (usually) to check its code. Find lib or src or other directory with code. Find an a filename which sounds important or interesting and start reading. Don t assume you are going to understand the code easily, but try to get an understanding what this class/function/file does and how it fits in the whole library that you already like and use. Spend as long doing it as you want. Usually we don t like jumping to unknown code as programmers and reading someone else code for the first time can be challenging. However most popular open source libraries usually maintain good quality because of the whole community effort. When you browse code of a library you use and like, you already know more or less its top-level API exposed for programmers. So this is not a completely strange code to you. I guarantee the feeling won t be the same as diving for the first time into a new, legacy project that your company got :) Although that can be interesting as well 2. The feeling will be more refreshing. More curiosity instead of worrying. After all, you don t need to maintain this codebase. You are just passing by, trying to learn something new and interesting that will make you a better programmer. Something worth sharing with your readers. You will be doing a few things at the same time: becoming a better programmer by reading and learning from good code becoming familiar with internals of interesting code 2

15 The easiest posts to write for a programming blog 12 promoting a library you like teaching other developers about programming techniques and bits of code from that library which inspired you Helping others and helping yourself at the same time. Everybody wins. Here is how I did it last time