Blogging so far this year
In January of this year I decided that I was going to try to blog every single day for a whole year. It’s July 1st now which means that I’m 6 months into the project. I had a number of reasons at the beginning for embarking on such an adventure:
- Get better known in the technical community around Calgary and Canada in general. I have been doing more talks and more open source projects in the last year in the hopes it raises my profile. I feel that I’m having some success in this area. I’ve joined the Calgary .net users group and I’ve given a number of talks at various conferences and .net workshops.
- Encourage me to learn about new technologies and to step outside of my normal box of understanding. I feel that I’m having some success in that area. I would never have looked at suchtechnologies as Dart or CoffeeScriptnor would I have delved so deeply into databases and a dozen other topics.
- Improve my writing by doing more of it. There is no way to improve at something which doesn’t involve at least some degree of practice. To that end I’ve written many thousands of words. Several of the words had more than onesyllable which is always impressive.
- Finally there was a selfish reason: I wasn’t really challenged at work and I wasn’t enjoying my job. I use the blog as a lifeline to keep me sane when working with ancient technologies like Windows XP and Microsoft Access. I figured having a lot of blogs would give me something to point at during job interviews.
I certainly feel that my goals have been largely accomplished but there has been a cost too: quality. Producing a post every weekday(even holidays, like today) means that I’m working to some pretty tight deadlines. Many of my posts have only scratched the surface of a technology or are justregurgitationsof a collection of other blog posts onthesame topic without providing my own take.
Sacrificing quality for quantity is a common trade off both in software and in the real world. As noted agile brain-box Steve Rogalskywould likely claim: deadlines are the enemy of quality. Having tried half a year of quantity over quality I’m going to switch it up for the next 6 months and try quality overquantity. I’m still going to try imposing a week long time box because I’ve got to publish something.