How I grew as a developer by writing blog posts 🖊
Hi Developer,
It’s Raymon from the Mr Frontend Community.
Thanks for subscribing to this weekly letter ❤️! In this newsletter, I will bring another positive message.
The Mr Frontend Webshop is launched 🎉 and packed with cool developer t-shirts, mugs and a lot of other merch!
How I grew as a developer by writing blog posts
Since I started with development after school, I was amazed by how good some people could write down and explain complex stuff in a simple way.
I wanted I could do the same! I wasn’t a great writer but felt the urge to write down the things I’ve learned in my daily job.
I just started with a simple WordPress website on raymonschouwenaar.nl (currently it isn’t WordPress anymore 😉).
What I mainly did was, when I discovered a weird bug in HTML, CSS or JavaScript, I needed to fix it. When I discovered what the solution was for the problem. I started writing it down, for myself, so I could look back at it later on.
Here are some examples of those kind of posts:
- 2 solutions for empty spaces below an html element (no margins used)
- Error: spawn C:\Python27 ENOENT npm
- The JavaScript array.forEach() method doesn’t return anything!
As you may see, these posts are pretty small and compact.
So what did I learned and what helped me grow?
- I practiced my writing skills over time
- I became better at explaining things
- I learned how to search for solutions to my bugs
- I gained more knowledge in-depth because I wanted to explain it as clear as possible
- Over time I learned that it was handy to help others by just sharing the links to my posts.
I could go on and on. But the main reason why you should start a blog is for yourself!
What will writing a blog bring you?
- A place you can read back your own solutions for problems you have and had
- If you want to write a more detailed post, it forces you to dive deeply in the techniques, instead of just knowing how it “just works”
- A place where potential employers can read how good you are in your work.
- You will help others!! (My favorite)
There will be more things that will bring you, but these are my most important ones.
How to get started?
You can start super simple and cheap.
Hosted and free: Make an account on …. - Dev.to - hashnode.com - Medium.com
If you want to stay in control of everything you could use a Static Site Generator like…
- Gatsby (based on React, used for the Mr Frontend website)
- Next.js (based on React)
- VuePress
- Jekyll (build on Ruby)
- Hugo (build on Go)
- …. for more, check StaticGen.com
The Static Site Generators can be hosted for free on Netlify.com even if you have your personal domain name.
No excuses
I think I’ve given you more than enough reason to start your blog 😊. And if you don’t want to, that is fine, but I don’t have any regret by doing it.
There are also no excuses in terms of easy-to-start places ore cheap places to get started with writing your blogs. Just do it 👍
If you have your own blog, please share it with me and I will share it on the Mr Frontend Twitter account 🙌 to get you some views!
Applause for all 100 days of code(rs)
100daysofcode: the massive amount of people took the challenge! So big applause for all of them! I’m very proud to see everyone doing great stuff on Twitter!
Top 3 links
- What’s new in Chrome (v77) Devtools: https://t.co/7cJyBxYRzm
- When to use omg, img@srcset, and picture and source: https://t.co/MFfZg3MnSz
- How to make your HTML responsive by adding a single line of CSS: https://t.co/k8THBMhHUj
Podcast
Have you already subscribed to the Mr Frontend Mentor podcast? It is available on:
Thanks!
I want to thank you for reading this letter this far! I hope you enjoyed reading it and learning from it!
If you have suggestions for next, please let me know via raymon@mrfrontend.org or just tweet/DM me via @frontendmr.
Happy coding!
Raymon