Some Thoughts On Blogging
In the spring of 2014 I was a college student in an IT program applying to coop job postings and needed something to differentiate myself from the other applicants. I decided that I would start a blog where I document random things I found interesting. Sound really broad? That’s because I didn’t really have any particular focus in mind and wanted to experiment with different topics. I think in the long run this was a good decision as it let me see what I was comfortable with, what worked and what didn't. This is the kind of thing you can learn best from experience but I will go more into detail about this later. For now, lets get back to my life story.
blog --init 💥
The first post came in April of 2014 titled Programming Paradigms. And yes I used WordPress back then. The post was short — 25 words — with a link to a YouTube series by Dr. Jerry Cain. If a picture is a thousand words I guess this video is 31.05 million (17.25min * 30fps * 1000words)? Does it work like that? 😅
Projects
After a few months I started working on a C++/Qt project called TLE. I used my blog to post screenshots and mockups (helpfully drawn by a close friend) whenever I got something interesting working. I’m confident to say that no one read it, but it was still nice just being able to get my thoughts onto “paper”. It helped me think about what I was doing and how I would explain it to someone who had never worked on the project before.
Getting Traction
As this was all going on, I started participating in the openSUSE community. I would post on the forums, the mailing lists and even in the IRC channel. I began to notice there were common questions about new releases and the direction of the project. So what did I do? I wrote blog posts explaining it for people who didn't have the time to watch the conference videos.
At this point the frequency of my posts got slower, partly due to the posts getting longer and partly due to being busy with school. To keep my blog alive I started blogging about things I was doing in school. This is how I started blogging about technical content (how to’s, beginners guides, etc.). The very first post like this was about configuring a DNS server in CentOS 6.6:
When I started posting these I began to notice that the traffic to my blog was increasing significantly. This gave me the confidence to try and write some bigger guides.
Moving To Medium
I discovered the existence of Medium around July 2016. I was really intrigued by the website since it looked really nice compared to my blog and seemed to be very popular with writers. After a bit of debating I decided to switch to Medium. A major reason I switched was in hopes that I would get better exposure. I wrote a reflection about using Medium that you can read here.
The Comprehensive Guide To AppArmor
In July 2016 I also released a guide to AppArmor called The Comprehensive Guide To AppArmor. The desire to create the post came from wanting to understand how AppArmor worked but having difficulty finding documentation that explained everything. So I decided to work with the developers of AppArmor to write a guide which explains all the basics you need to know to use AppArmor. The guide can be found here. This is one of the most unique posts I have ever written as it went through several revisions and I had constant feedback from the actual developers of AppArmor — something I don't usually get from tools I write about.
Becoming A Dev
In 2016 I graduated from my college and felt that I would still like to learn more about computers. So I decided to sign up for a transfer program that lets college students transfer into year 3 at McMaster university. At the end of my first year (April 2017) at McMaster we were allowed to apply to internship jobs and thinking it was good to get some work experience I applied. I ended up getting a position as a Software Developer Intern at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP).
During my time at OTPP I worked with both JavaScript and Java. At the same time I was working on personal projects in my free time. At the start I started trying to re-implement a project I had created in school — a podcast feed. For our school project we had implemented it using Qt but the code was a mess and we had no tests. I decided to build the app again but this time using JavaFX — because it would help me get better at Java for work — and to test it, something I learned the importance of at work. While developing this application I learned a lot about testing philosophies and how to test JavaFX. Noticing that there was almost no documentation for TestFX — a library used to test JavaFX applications — I wrote some (you can find here).
This post turned out to be quite popular as there seems to be demand for testing JavaFX but a lack of documentation.
Saka
Spring of 2018 and I ended up becoming the maintainer of a browser extension called Saka. As I took over for the previous maintainer I was forced to learn a lot of the tools used in JavaScript projects. Things like Webpack, Karma, Babel and so on. As I began to understand the project I realized that there were no tests to validate the behavior of the application. This caused me worry — I didn’t have confidence in myself to modify code without breaking other parts of the app. So I decided to learn how browser extensions were tested and realizing it was not documented well I wrote a blog post titled Unit Testing Browser Extension that you can read here.
Saka represents a pretty important milestone in my journey as a dev. For the first time I was maintaining a project I had full control of that other people actually used! It was very exciting but also a bit nerve wrecking — I didn’t want to break it and lose users as a result. Looking back, it was a great idea to take over Saka since I have learned so much about JavaScript while maintaining it and it has inspired a lot of content on this blog.
Reflection
As my life has changed so has my blog. In a way it is a reflection of where I am with my life, what my focuses are and what goals I have for the future. It has changed quite a bit from what it started out as but I think it has only gotten better. It took me a long time to become confident enough to write my own content but it has been important in helping me learn new things and helping others do the same.
If you liked this post be sure to follow this blog, follow me on twitter and my blog on dev.to.
P.S. Looking to contribute to an open source project? Come contribute to Saka, we could use the help! You can find the project here: https://github.com/lusakasa/saka
