You know, I've been blogging on and off for years. I've tried Medium, WordPress, a personal blog with Gatsby but never could make it an habit.
This June I've decided to write for exact 20 minutes everyday, no excuses, and I finally feel like it is starting to get automatic. 20 min is quick enough that I can push through when I don't feel like writing but sums up to about 2 writing hours a week, which is enough for a brief article.
That new habit won me what I believe it was my most read piece of content ever. The funny titled "3 cool CSS tricks to impress your friends at parties" post I did here.
So yeah, that was my major win this week. I feel that DEV as a platform is just what I needed in terms of audience and feedback to keep writing every day and becoming a better developer in the meantime.
Self Driven, Community taught Software Engineer. I tweet about how I'm doing it while providing the resources I've used along the way. Created https://devtorising.com
This makes me so happy to read. And I loved your "party tricks" post. A handful of us on the DEV content team really got a kick out of it and found the content super useful. I want to go to those kinds of parties 😂 Congrats on your new writing habit, Vitor. Keep it up!
And I like your approach of just doing 20 minutes a week. I'll have to give that a try. I've been wanting to blog more, but find myself getting blank screen paralysis and avoiding it entirely.
That sounds interesting. I've tried a lot of different things but so this strategy is what is working best.
The good part about being hard on that 20 min limit is that I started to naturally think about the article that I'm writing during the day, maybe because my brain knows that I don't have much time to put it down.
One thing that makes it hard for me, however, is over-planning my post. If I try to write the next sections without being done with the current I get stuck.
Yes to over-planning! My draft process is a lot of bullet points of ideas, that I tend shuffle into cohesive sections (hopefully) then flesh out into something readable.
I will say that The Developer's Guide to Content Creation has made the writing process easier. The worksheets there and smaller writing blocks have made finishing a post easier when I take the brain power to get it done.
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You know, I've been blogging on and off for years. I've tried Medium, WordPress, a personal blog with Gatsby but never could make it an habit.
This June I've decided to write for exact 20 minutes everyday, no excuses, and I finally feel like it is starting to get automatic. 20 min is quick enough that I can push through when I don't feel like writing but sums up to about 2 writing hours a week, which is enough for a brief article.
That new habit won me what I believe it was my most read piece of content ever. The funny titled "3 cool CSS tricks to impress your friends at parties" post I did here.
So yeah, that was my major win this week. I feel that DEV as a platform is just what I needed in terms of audience and feedback to keep writing every day and becoming a better developer in the meantime.
Really enjoyed your article!! Thank you for sharing, and keep on going you’re crushing it!
This makes me so happy to read. And I loved your "party tricks" post. A handful of us on the DEV content team really got a kick out of it and found the content super useful. I want to go to those kinds of parties 😂 Congrats on your new writing habit, Vitor. Keep it up!
That was a great article.
And I like your approach of just doing 20 minutes a week. I'll have to give that a try. I've been wanting to blog more, but find myself getting blank screen paralysis and avoiding it entirely.
Related to this, I toyed with the idea of breaking down blogged into Tweet-sized sections.
As opposed to writing a blog post, it's writing a Tweet's worth of content and taking time later to string them together into a cohesive blog post.
That sounds interesting. I've tried a lot of different things but so this strategy is what is working best.
The good part about being hard on that 20 min limit is that I started to naturally think about the article that I'm writing during the day, maybe because my brain knows that I don't have much time to put it down.
One thing that makes it hard for me, however, is over-planning my post. If I try to write the next sections without being done with the current I get stuck.
Yes to over-planning! My draft process is a lot of bullet points of ideas, that I tend shuffle into cohesive sections (hopefully) then flesh out into something readable.
I will say that The Developer's Guide to Content Creation has made the writing process easier. The worksheets there and smaller writing blocks have made finishing a post easier when I take the brain power to get it done.