Discussion on: Lessons From My One-Month Writing Milestone

Hello Ruanna! I am glad you enjoyed! Good question, I think my retrospective tips are this:

1. Define your end-goal. Mine was a mix of sharing, combatting unnecessary sleep-ins and improving writing. The quantity certainly helped me personally learn, but very unsure about the quality some days, which leads me to the next learn...
2. Set a reasonable first milestone to celebrate. I set the 30 days, but I went with the goal of writing every day. Admittedly, that is not always feasible and sometimes I was in a rush. I feel if I put more emphasis on just sitting down and writing for 20-30 minutes each morning instead of "I need to get something out each day" would have been a nicer approach. Setting unreasonable deadlines on yourself is never fun but we all do it.
3. Write about what you're learning or doing. It really helped me to write about what I was learning or doing. I did borrow some time at work to slow down and write things clearer. Writing has the added benefit of helping you digest information if you are sharing.
4. Automate where possible. This in itself isn't always feasible, but you can get creative. It saved me a bunch of time and you can use what you create for some post ideas.

For (4), a number of the posts I actually wrote were things I ended up building to help automate my blog posts.

1. Programatically create or update GitHub files - I wrote this after writing a script to add blog posts to my GitHub remotely (my blog repo has a Netlify integration to always rebuild and deploy my updates when the main branch changes).
2. Scraping websites with Xray - I built a website scraper to collect news from my favourite resources so I could be inspired for what to write next.
3. Build your own code generator in JavaScript - I used this to help generate my basic blog markdown files with command line arguments.
4. Build a CLI Puppeteer tool to screenshot all the things! - I built this to build tools to start screenshotting LaTeX and RoughJS which you can see in other blogs posts here and here respectively)
5. Docker + GitHub Actions = Your Next Productivity Superpower - I wrote this while build a GitHub action to automatically Tweet new posts, which combined with...
6. 4 Easy Steps To Building Your First Twitter Bot With JavaScript - when I was going through the process of building the bot for that GitHub action.

Apologies that this is a long reply, but hopefully those tips are an earnest retro on it! Lastly, I'd say don't be too hard on yourself if you have other priorities. Now that I'm past day 30, I am certainly going to slow down and get into something else I enjoy!