Hi friend 👋

First, thank you for signing up for my newsletter on my website or through my blog!

The last couple of months have been crazy. In a good way — not a bad way!

Here's why:

Back in Q4 of 2020, I decided that I wanted to start sharing my knowledge and development journey with the community; not things like "Here's what I'm doing today", but helpful content that I've picked up from my job, side hustles and from other developers in the community.

My hope is that it proves helpful to you, too.

I believe every developer should have some sort of outlet to share their experiences and knowledge with others. After all, I bet you're the developer you are today because of articles that you've read or video tutorials you've watched online from the developer community.

I wanted to share content at scale. There are many things I've done over the last few months to work towards that goal (and things I'm still working on), but here are a few I want to discuss today:

1. Revamp my portfolio
2. Start a blog
3. Share valuable content

Revamping my portfolio

I wanted my portfolio website to act as a central hub for my content; somewhere you could go to quickly access any of my tutorials, find my GitHub repositories and sign up for my newsletter.

My old portfolio was noticeably dated. It was actually built with just a single HTML document and a bloated stylesheet. That's it. No JavaScript. Nothing fancy. No frameworks.

The thing that bugged me the most about my old website is that it looked terrible.

I'm a sucker for clean, aesthetically-pleasing websites. This, perhaps more than anything, motivated me to start working on an update.

I did a bit of research back in October of 2020 and finally decided to power my portfolio with Gatsby, style with TailwindCSS (V2!), deliver content with Contentful and deploy with Netlify.

There's several reasons why I went with this stack (Next.js users don't hate me, please). I plan on writing a blog article about the process soon.

I worked on my website in my spare time in the evenings and I had a rough draft within a few weeks.

I wanted it to be perfect. But I knew if I kept tweaking small things here and there, I'd never actually release the website. Once I was happy with the majority of the content and overall look, I decided to hit the scary publish button and release it into the wild.

My updated portfolio is now live over at braydoncoyer.dev.

What do you think?

Starting a blog

I knew blog articles would be one of the major ways I would share my thoughts, ideas and helpful tidbits online. (Spoiler — I didn't know I enjoyed writing as much as I do!)

This presented a big unknown. How was I going to start my blog? Where would I host it? Would I have to build it myself or was there a platform that handled the infrastructure for me?

After hours of research, I finally decided to host my blog over on Hashnode.

Why?

I knew I wanted to have my articles live on my revamped portfolio, but I also knew I didn't want to juggle the painful experience of maintaining the blog myself. With Hashnode I get the best of both worlds: I get to share my content with thousands of developers and have my articles live on my domain!

My blog now lives over at https://blog.braydoncoyer.dev/

Since the middle of October, I’ve released over twenty articles. The response from the community has been very positive with over 17,000 reads across the twenty articles, and other partnership opportunities arising just because I’m writing a few times each week.

Here’s a few articles I released in January:

• Creating a Killer GitHub Profile README Part 1
• Creating a Killer GitHub Profile README Part 2
• The progress HTML Tag

If you want to start a blog, consider giving Hashnode a try. I started my blog and got it connected to my domain in 3 minutes!

If you'd like, you can use my referral link to sign up for free! I don't get any money from Hashnode if you sign up and publish your first article, but I may end up with some swag!

If you have a developer blog, reply to this email and let me know! I’d love to check it out and share it with the community!

Sharing valuable content

One of the best ways to grow your social presence is by posting regularly and making sure that the content is valuable to your target audience. Because I specialize in front-end development, I tweet a lot about HTML, CSS & JavaScript.

Posting regularly is extremely difficult, especially since I’m working full-time. I also don't want to be glued to Twitter all day! There are many scheduling tools online to help remedy this, but I've been using feedhive.io for a portion of January and the results have been fantastic!

My goal is to continue to grow my social presence in 2021. That means more valuable content being shared. I can't wait!

Helpful content from the community

Even though I love sharing content with the community, I also learn a lot from others. I’d like to highlight articles, tutorials or tweets that have helped in some way over the last few months. Or even content that blew my mind. 🤯

First up is Changelog - a new podcast that helps you keep up-to-date with the latest changes and updates in software and hardware. Changelog's episodes are short and to-the-point; no fluff so you can get the updates you need about the languages, frameworks and tools you use regularly (I especially found the Angular 11 episode informative).

Check out Changelog here!

Next, @javascriptural recently released an image of Mona Lisa’s hands -- made entirely in CSS!

I’m a huge advocate of test driven development (TDD). Not sure why TDD is helpful?

Perhaps this tweet from @macerub will help clear it up.

Wrapping up

There we go. Issue #1 of my newsletter is in the books, giving you an inside look at what I've been working on the past several months! I'm working on lots of things in February (including a few side projects I can't wait to show you!) and hope to give you an update in the next email!

Thank you for reading! I'm looking forward to seeing how this newsletter grows and evolves in 2021! It's going to be fun!

Until next time!

-Braydon

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https://buttondown.email/braydoncoyer

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