Welcome to my blog. I’ve wanted to start posting and documenting somewhere for a while now and here it is. Here are my reasons and thoughts behind why…
There’s always the nostalgia factor of being able to look back at previous things I’ve built but I can get that just by pushing my code up to something like GitHub. However, the added bonuses of writing about what I build include being able to tap into previous thought processes or documenting pitfalls I inevitably will fall into.
In the past, I’ve tended to learn whatever has interested me at the time which works well as it never feels like a chore. Saying that, I think it’s tended to make me a bit of a dabbler - jumping between things. One week I’m building a game in Unity, the next a mobile app with Flutter, never learning one thing as deeply as perhaps I should.
I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with dabbling but I think it’s valuable having a rough direction. It’s okay to go off the path originally set out on but not to do a U turn (unless it’s really bad I guess). Writing code full time has definitely helped me with this direction.
I’ve tried setting stricter goals previously (code or non code related) but never stuck to them as much as I’d like. Writing them on a physical piece of paper or sticky note has never worked for me as it all just gets lost into the organized mess. Writing them digitally means they get lost even quicker as I’ll never go back to those documents. I’ve also tried gamifying apps such as Habitify but I just stop going back to them after some time and the constant notifications turn into white noise.
The big difference with a format like this is that it is publicly visible. Even if nobody reads this, in theory someone could, and that’s hopefully just the right level of accountability for me to stick to these things.
At the time of writing, I’ve been working in my full time coding role for a little over six months. In this time, I’ve completed a couple of spikes that I’ve then documented and shared with my team. I’ve also done a Tech Talk which is an open meeting we have for people to demonstrate a piece of software they’ve been playing around with in a casual environment (I did mine on act).
I’m hoping that by practicing writing about code or explaining things, I’ll both learn those things more thoroughly as well as becoming a more effective communicator.