As a programmer, you may think you're too much into writing code and getting systems built, so you have no time for writing courses. You're not alone. I thought the same until about a year and a few months ago when everything changed, for the better.
I was always the consumer of courses but never a producer. Oh, I even thought I wasn't good enough to publish courses. What I failed to understand is that you learn more by teaching than you do by learning.
I Failed In an Instant, Then I Got Up 🚀
Fast forward in 2019-2020, I got to know about raywenderlich.com at a time they were looking for technical editors for Flutter. I became interested and applied. Unfortunately, I couldn't qualify since my social profiles were not looking great and I didn't have enough content to prove my worth too.
Then came 2021. I had an email from the team at raywenderlich.com again that it's been a year since I was rejected and I may try again.
At first, I said no, thinking it was one of the spam emails I constantly received. But then, Annette replied that I should let her know if I ever change my mind. That was when I remembered that I applied for this the past year. And that's when my story began!
The Beginning of My Adventure
I went through a tryout and finally got a chance to tech-edit an article. It was overwhelming at first, but I grew to like it for the fact that I learned more than I could ever do if I had to read a tutorial.
My second article came like a breeze and I was already loving everything about tech-editing, especially at raywenderlich. It even made me get more interested in writing. So I started my own blog and began my writing process.
Within a few months, I had an email from Educative.io asking me to publish a course on AlpineJs. I gladly did and here's the next part of my story.
Publishing My First Course
Publishing my first course wasn't that easy, but it wasn't too difficult either. It took months for it to get through various stages. It got to a time I almost became fed up waiting but I eventually understood what it takes to publish a great course.
Finally, we published the course in May 2022. Honestly, I've benefited from the course more than I've ever done with any of the projects I created for clients. What's more, I'm still getting paid monthly for promoting the course, unlike the one-time payment I get from developing software for clients.
The course is titled Mastering AlpineJS in a Day or Less, if you care to know. And, it was my first paid course so you know how proud I became after it was published.
Going Forward...
After I submitted my work for editing on Educative.io, my interest in authoring technical content grew exponentially. So I asked my team lead at raywenderlich.com to give me a chance to write an article. He did, and I published my first article: Building Dart APIs With Google Cloud Run.
Ever since, I've been an active part of the raywenderlich.com Flutter team and an author at Educative.io and I'm loving it. I've never looked back and I like the fact that I get paid for learning and doing what I love so much.
I hope this article gingers you up to start writing, not only for the pay but for the learning benefits too. Let me know your story in the comments. What are your experiences?
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