My understanding of consistency is not to reward quantity but rather create and emphasize consistent structures, links, and learning paths.
Quantity, Quality, and Meaning
While my GitHub's contribution count calendar looks nice and might help our motivation, that's exactly the kind of consistency (in the sense of persistence) that doesn't help me make sense of what I'm doing and where I'm going.
Using series can be very helpful, especially when you're interested in many different topics and have side projects progressing slowly over a couple of years.
A Roadmap into the Unknown
Much like a subscription to a gym or dancing lessons, a professional training curriculum, or sequels to a film or novel, these are stages on the journey, giving us an idea where to go, despite the uncertainties of our destiny.
Road sign: "Happy journey of life is long and the pat(h) unknown."
Series of my (Web) Developer Journey
I have been following fellow developers' series and put together a long list of bookmarks and reading list excerpts in the past. Now I will show how I use series to structure my own content and develop a road map for my upcoming developer journey.
What's next in CSS?
What's next in CSS? has been my developer journal exploring the new possibilities of style sheets in the early 2020s. After having been restricted to a narrow technological focus as an employee and frustrated about styled React components in a long-running project, this helped me rediscover frontend development and professional satisfaction.
Apart from the notable CSS :has(.parent-selectors) ๐ช, I explored aspect-ratio, wide gamut colors, container queries, and several other new and practical CSS features.
Learning in public and building a Preact App
Maybe the best examples for long-running side projects are both my way to getting certified as a Shopware Developer two years after first enrolling and paying for the training, and my ambitious quest for the right way to build a full-stack application using JavaScript or TypeScript.
- Learning in public
- Building a Reading List web app with Node, Preact, and Tailwind CSS
- Testing Astro to revive my React side project
Like most developers doing open source, I'm also "learning in public" on GitHub, where you can see most (but not all) of my recent work that involved coding, and I added a more customized GitHub profile using the GitHub pages functionality.
Pragmatic Quality Assurance for Lazy Developers
Another ambitious goal seldom put into practice is test-driven development, so I tried to explore a more pragmatic approach instead and created my blog series about pragmatic quality assurance.
Using Shopware as a Developer
Having concluded my series about learning in public, upcoming blog posts will be filed into more specific categories like Shopware 6 Development or the utopian attempt to use WordPress as a developer.
Shopware is a freemium e-commerce software based on the Symfony PHP framework, giving developers full control and customizability instead of Shopify's vendor lock-in and WooCommerce's shortcomings and incompatibilities. Many sustainable brands like Armedangels or Koro use Shopware 6, and my new Shopware 6 Demo Shop attempts to scale from small startups to complex corporate requirements.
Using WordPress as a Developer
Another "there must be a way to use this technology better": I have been using WordPress for about two decades now and I am quite unhappy about the recent updates. However, I see the value that they were supposed to bring to non-tech-savvy users. Using WordPress as a Developer, I try to describe and solve the problems arising from incompatible plugins and the many misfeatures of the Gutenberg block editor.
Constructive Criticism
Having had many reasons to rant, I tried to reflect and make sense of my "first-world" problems, to find out what's wrong with the way the I, like many other web developers, have been working in the past.
Multimedia Content Creation
Coming back to a more positive and optimistic perspective, I also set out to make a plan to follow-up on my ambitious development goals and share my insights with others in different ways.
There is my old personal weblog, Open Mind Culture, there is this very blog on DEV.to and some other, mostly text-based, platforms like medium, Hashnode, Substack, or Tealfeed, and then there are the visual ones. I haven't been publishing a lot on Instagram and flickR anymore, and I haven't been using YouTube for months, but I haven't been at many meetups either, so that's definitely something missing until now.
I will record some video content, and I will share what hardware and software I have been using, and I will also become more active at meetups and conferences again!
Follow-Up: Ingo Steinke's series about Multimedia Content Creation
Sustainable Low-Waste Tech
Last but not least, my greatest ambition to change the way we use technology, didn't resonate with many others until now. So maybe it is not a good idea not to feature it on top of this article. But time will tell, and we can't go "back to normal" anyway, because the old "normal" has been causing a lot of problems.
My dev blog post series about sustainable low-waste tech is another pragmatic approach, much like my series about quality assurance, to show and prove that we can do something and that that is better than doing nothing at all.
If you're interested in joining me on my journey, feel free to follow my blog and leave a comment!
Top comments (3)
Limiting social media time: I reserved two weekly time slots for my preferable posting times on Mondays and Wednesdays, but it takes time to research, elaborate and refine, so I have to count that in as well. But my initial research does not count as social media, but rather as learning time, unless I start getting lost reading unrelated blog posts.
What motivated you to structure your developer journey into series, and how has this approach helped you navigate through various topics and side projects over the years? Additionally, for those considering creating their own blog series, what advice would you offer based on your experience in maintaining consistent and meaningful content?
Series helped me to find and follow up with my content more easily, and I hope that it also helps other people to find related posts matching their interest.