What are the reasons for which you're writing articles on dev.to and how do you keep yourself motivated to do it on a constant basis?
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Over the past 20 years, I've benefited greatly by free sites such as:
I leaned a long time ago that I could use these sites to help others; as well as to document things that I once knew but have since forgotten. My articles and answers act as my own personal library of the stacks I've learned over the years.
Of all the sites above, Dev.to stands out:
If you are reading this, I urge you to take a deep look into Dev.To. As the years go by, I assure you that you will not remember every aspect of solutions you spent years uncovering. Start documenting today, and build your own personal IT Journey to help others and to help yourself later on, when you need a little reminder on "how it was done".
Haha, I really felt the "There are no Nazi-like moderators like StackOverFlow." point. Up until this day I'm scared of asking question on Stack Overflow. How do you feel about having your own personal blog (your domain and all)? I always had this fear that if something goes south with the hosting websites, I will lose all of my content. Thx for the input.
Just last week I tried to help someone on StackOverflow. I had put in a link to a post made here which was perfect fit for the answer. What happened was my reply was deleted. When I asked about it, I was told Links are not allowed because you are promting that other site! When I complained about it I was voted down 20 times. So I just deleted the meta post, my original reply and deleted many others just like it. I'm done trying to help others on StackOverflow.
Personal blog is ok but I usually put all my time into real job.
For me, I wanted an alternative to medium which is also a blogging system with a (possible) paywall. However I always felt like that if you write there, your content won't be owned by the author but rather by medium because they may decide that you'll be behind a paywall. Medium also allows you to build up or get into a community that focuses on developing (Microsoft Data Platform in my case) but dev.to is much more focused on this.
I like the community here and the fact that you potentially could use a CI/CD system to publish your articles so that you may even have an article in a gist on github. It also integrates Twitter very well.
The reason why I am motivated to write at all? Well, I like to interact with a community and to learn or to teach in it. When I've learnt something in my career is this: Even if you're most senior, you will always be learning in this industry regardless if it is from another senior, professional or even beginners! This is why having poeple around you to discuss or just to read is so much fun!
I also publish on Medium sometimes but I feel the exposure is somehow bigger here. But this must be because Medium is not focused on technical writing only so maybe your articles get lost in a huge sea of many diverse topics. The community here is great, I agree. Thank you for the input :).
My first article was about my own big failure.
I wanted to share the experience so others could learn from it.
Now, I'm using writing/filming as a way to organize my own thoughts also help others by doing so.
I've actually even gone so far to start a Youtube channel called developerHabits - all with the goal to share my experiences and learn from others'.
I believe teaching is the best way to learn. And that's what motivates me to keep going.
// almost forgot. By sharing your ideas, you also initiate discussions where you get to see others' perspective.
That's my one of my biggest motivations.
I also write for my future self. I find that I reference my blog posts a lot and that's the more reason to write better content. Because I might need that knowledge in future.
"I also write for my future self.". This is a nice way to think about things. I wish that sometimes in the future I can look at my struggles and be proud of how far I've come. Thank you for your input.
I agree with everything you said. When I write I never assume that my way of doing things is the only or the best way and it's always exciting when I see people trying to come up with different solutions. Thank you for your input :)!
I want to share what I've learned. There have been times I've looked to solve a problem and couldn't find much when searching the internet, so a lot of discovery and and improvising is done for the work I do at Hanley Wood.
For instance, there are things we've done with Google Tag Manager that were hard to find examples of that I'd like to share.
I'd also like to share how we manage several (15+?) websites that share the same HTML but have their own custom designs, which has been quite the journey. We've moved from standard CSS, to using the advanced features of LESS for code reuse, and now we're experimenting with dumping a large chunk of that for Atomic CSS.
When it comes down to actually writing down my thoughts, i start to doubt myself. So I'm slow to put out content and I've got some pieces I've abandon.
Between DEV and Medium I've learned a lot and would like to contribute in hopes of helping someone.
Equal parts "maybe my knowledge could help someone else" and "someone is wrong on the internet".
Plus a splash of self expression.
Also, answering things in #challenge can be fun.
I really giggled at "someone is wrong on the internet". I guess this could be an interesting motivation. And thx for the #challenge. I didn't know about this tag until now :).