In the beginning of the summer I received my five year membership badge on dev.to. Since I was at my 99th. post I thought I would take the time to write up my 100th. post and reflect on my 5 years of membership.
I love blogging and love to read blog posts. But I also love programming, running and reading books. At the same time I have to go to work and be involved in my family, the last point being the most important.
My activity on dev.to very much reflects all of the above.
I have to balance time and it is hard. When I have spare time to sit at the computer, I have to decide on how to spend that precious time, coding, blogging, learning or reading.
I have learned that when blogging consistency is important, so I have tried to schedule regular postings. When I did not have a real blog post lined up, I would just pick something from my Today I Learned collection. All in all a good strategy, which worked out pretty well for some time, but it does not really fit with an irregular availability schedule.
My TIL collection also requires time maintaining, since I decided to make my learnings and notes publicly available, making these useful to myself as well as others is also a time consumer.
Blogging is fun, but it does mean that my side-projects, research and learning are not progressing at a satisfactory pace.
I would really love to write up more deep diving blog posts on topics that interest me, but it is even more time consuming. I have pondered about writing about my day job and work, but have not really gotten around to it, since it would require more work, since writing about your day job, does require a little more finesse.
I am the maintainer of several open source projects and much of my keyboard time is spent maintaining these. I long ago started blogging when I made releases, so the bare changes and change log would not stand alone. This has worked quite well since it lets me produce posts more regularly, where I can reflect on my open source work, but sometimes, it just feels like yak-shaving and I am not sure how interesting it is to read.
I currently have 1130 followers, which is crazy, since what I write, is not that interesting, but I really appreciate the following and the occasional likes and comments on my posts.
If I speculate about the future, I can hope and dream that I will be able to find time to write more, but realistically this is a pipe dream.
I will however not stop blogging here on dev.to, just as I will not stop reading all of the great posts, which make dev.to such a great forum and community.
So please keep posting on dev.to and I will read, like and sometimes comment and when I have time to share something of value I will chip in. Whether it be release announcements, selections from my TIL collection or something more substantial, perhaps about my side-projects, I will make sure it makes it's way to dev.to.
I am proud of my 5 year badge, but not of only having made 100 posts, this one counting, but I will post when I can and when I have something worth sharing, but I all I can guarantee is that it will be irregular and it will not be overwhelming.
Top comments (0)