The next installment of the beginner python series will be delayed due to needing to backtrack. My original though was using tox to automate testing with the various tools I've gone over. Then I realized midway that discussing code documentation would be a better next step after testing so I'm back to the drawing board again progress wise. This means there might not be another update for a week/week and a half. Once this is done there will be one more article before I think I'm done with the series.
Why I Write
I haven't really touched on what motivates me to write technical articles. Most of my technical writing started back in the days when I was part of the Gentoo Linux project. I showed how to setup certain packages and actually helped the Japanese team with translations. From there it just kind of stuck as "my thing" in terms of contributions. So much in fact that one of my previous jobs hired me based on my passion for documentation.
Now I did have a time where I thought about monetizing articles (also finding out how so companies tend to "forget" they're supposed to be paying you). As I've aged like a not so fine wine I started to contemplate how I really wanted to give back to the community in general. That's when I started writing docs on dev.to, for free, no strings attached. This article and many others are available on GitHub under creative commons licensing. Some of the more on key reasons I provide them for free:
- Doing it for money causes pressure
- If I attempted to monetize it, that might mean that the college students who are a sizeable majority of my readers might not have as much access to it
- My content is more attached to me in a way that I have control over
Now, if I was about to go bankrupt levels of financial trouble then yes I might consider trying to make money off content. Until then my current job is enough to keep things running.
Writing For Beginners
Another side of this story is that I've been doing a lot of off the side hobby things as I've finally hit that point of "wow I might get burned out soon!". Part of it is that writing for beginners is more effort than writing to the more technically savvy users. For example, in the first installment of the beginning python series I showed how to install python for several different operating systems in a way that would be straightforward for a new user to get up and running. If I was working with more adept users I'd instead just point to the install guide and let them figure it out. I also am making sure that I test and run every command I talk about to make sure there are no surprises.
More Contributing
Lately I've also been wanting to do more open source work, but writing articles kind of takes away from that. This includes my PyPyInstaller project for windows as well as a python project for creating self signed certs programmatically. It also would be nice to contribute to various projects in terms of bug wrangling. This most likely means articles will go from a one week pace to "whenever my time is free".
Wrapping Up
So basically expect the pacing to be a lot slower than the weekly speed I've been managing so far. In fact I'm actually surprised I managed to come this far without terrible burn out. I'll see where the future takes me and hopefully some future articles will be around open source contributions.
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