I'm Jake Cahill. Lifetime Pythonista, web scraping and automation expert. Enjoy books. Love my wife, dog, and cat, and think AI and Julia are pretty nifty
Location
Maine, USA
Education
A Master's patient mentorship and insatiable curiosity
I love that somebody else feels this way. I have written 10 drafts of a debut fantasy novel of totalling about 400,000 words altogether, but never submitted.it to anyone. I put a blog on my company's website when we just did computer repair, but after 6 months of about 4 visitors/month to the website and none to the blog, I couldn't stand the sense of failure. Only 2 followers on Medium in my entire life, 0 followers on any social media platform, and endless ripping my hair out as to "why I cannot get anybody interested in anything I have to say?!?!", and trying absolutely everything that any marketing blogger suggests to generate traffic, I had all but given up.
I tried every posting schedule, used buzzsumo to try to find out what was hot in tech, emailing countless "influencers" for backlinks and nothing worked. Then I found dev.to and decided to sign up without my personal name and just see what was what. But then, imposter syndrome, so I retreated into the caves of the Misty Mountains and allowed the One Imposter Insyndrome poison my mind for several months. Then, just for the heck of it, I came back about two weeks ago and just started tossing stuff up that I felt could help others understand in human terms. Now I'm a handful of followers short of 400 (what?!?!) and people seem to see my writing and instruction as relevant.
There are two major parts to this:
Dev.to is a phenomenal community that is not saturated with click-baity nonsense and is peopled by excellent folks willing to talk to anybody who will listen
I was no longer writing to impress. I just posted because I was seeing a lot of common Python concepts being used but not properly understood and I wanted to provide a quick, easy to understand clarification.
While it is still a struggle, o firmly agree that blogging should not be a career you set out to achieve, but on that becomes available after pursuing it for nothing other than "love of the game". Wonderful post!
Very glad you finally got your blogging groove, and in a way that fit more with what you wanted to write and learn about!
Also if you still have that fantasy novel, LeanPub could be a good place to self-publish it if you ever get back to it. You've certainly gotten farther than me on that front - I've got one idea for a novel and fleshed out some details, but never really got the guts to start writing and self-publishing it.
I'm Jake Cahill. Lifetime Pythonista, web scraping and automation expert. Enjoy books. Love my wife, dog, and cat, and think AI and Julia are pretty nifty
Location
Maine, USA
Education
A Master's patient mentorship and insatiable curiosity
Thank you, I am too. I find that Dev is different in that, it is not saturated with nonsense articles that have a title promising to reveal the secrets of life, a first paragraph that leads up to said secret, then a paywall you need pony up to in order to get the secret. Nor do they encourage similar behavior even from their bigger contributors (at least that I've seen).
I'm not sure if Dev has plans to partner with contributors for paid content someday and honestly, I don't know how this wonderful community could be maintained if they did, no matter how great the intentions. But for now, the people are here to learn and teach, not get paid. That makes a huge difference for sure!
As for my novel, I've written it fully about 10 times over the last 12 years and have the entire series mapped out. I've got the first 5 parts (of about 150) of book 1 up on Wattpad, but lost motivation with that as well. For me, that is just a labor of love as well. The world is based on a place I've played in with my imagination since I was 5 or 6 years old 😁😁
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I love that somebody else feels this way. I have written 10 drafts of a debut fantasy novel of totalling about 400,000 words altogether, but never submitted.it to anyone. I put a blog on my company's website when we just did computer repair, but after 6 months of about 4 visitors/month to the website and none to the blog, I couldn't stand the sense of failure. Only 2 followers on Medium in my entire life, 0 followers on any social media platform, and endless ripping my hair out as to "why I cannot get anybody interested in anything I have to say?!?!", and trying absolutely everything that any marketing blogger suggests to generate traffic, I had all but given up.
I tried every posting schedule, used buzzsumo to try to find out what was hot in tech, emailing countless "influencers" for backlinks and nothing worked. Then I found dev.to and decided to sign up without my personal name and just see what was what. But then, imposter syndrome, so I retreated into the caves of the Misty Mountains and allowed the One Imposter Insyndrome poison my mind for several months. Then, just for the heck of it, I came back about two weeks ago and just started tossing stuff up that I felt could help others understand in human terms. Now I'm a handful of followers short of 400 (what?!?!) and people seem to see my writing and instruction as relevant.
There are two major parts to this:
Dev.to is a phenomenal community that is not saturated with click-baity nonsense and is peopled by excellent folks willing to talk to anybody who will listen
I was no longer writing to impress. I just posted because I was seeing a lot of common Python concepts being used but not properly understood and I wanted to provide a quick, easy to understand clarification.
While it is still a struggle, o firmly agree that blogging should not be a career you set out to achieve, but on that becomes available after pursuing it for nothing other than "love of the game". Wonderful post!
Very glad you finally got your blogging groove, and in a way that fit more with what you wanted to write and learn about!
Also if you still have that fantasy novel, LeanPub could be a good place to self-publish it if you ever get back to it. You've certainly gotten farther than me on that front - I've got one idea for a novel and fleshed out some details, but never really got the guts to start writing and self-publishing it.
Thank you, I am too. I find that Dev is different in that, it is not saturated with nonsense articles that have a title promising to reveal the secrets of life, a first paragraph that leads up to said secret, then a paywall you need pony up to in order to get the secret. Nor do they encourage similar behavior even from their bigger contributors (at least that I've seen).
I'm not sure if Dev has plans to partner with contributors for paid content someday and honestly, I don't know how this wonderful community could be maintained if they did, no matter how great the intentions. But for now, the people are here to learn and teach, not get paid. That makes a huge difference for sure!
As for my novel, I've written it fully about 10 times over the last 12 years and have the entire series mapped out. I've got the first 5 parts (of about 150) of book 1 up on Wattpad, but lost motivation with that as well. For me, that is just a labor of love as well. The world is based on a place I've played in with my imagination since I was 5 or 6 years old 😁😁