The first blog that really caught me was Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood. He is also one of the cofounders of Stack Overflow and Discourse. I was super late on the train when I discovered it in 2012. At the time I worked as a programmer at an enterprise software company and was constantly frustrated with the shitty code I was maintaining and writing myself. So Jeff hit a nerve when he wrote in the great enterprise software swindle:
It’s madness. As far as I’m concerned, the word “Enterprise” is now so tainted that it’s best used as an epithet. Dude, your software sucks so much, it’s enterprise software.
There are many reasons to start a blog. Jeff Atwood lists a few good ones in how to achieve ultimate blog success in one easy step:
Every time I wrote, I got a little better at writing. Every time I wrote, I learned a little more about the topic, how to research topics effectively, where the best sources of information were. Every time I wrote, I was slightly more plugged in to the rich software development community all around me.
Lately I spent a lot of time on side projects. I was competing in the Rossman kaggle challenge and after the challenge I tried to rebuild the winning solution from the winners notes. And I started to play around with Neural Nets using Keras.
It’s my free time, so I just do the fun part. I make it work 80% in 20% of the time and hardly document anything. I sharpen my saw and often reach a state of flow which already makes it worthwile.
But I know I can do better. For myself and for others. That is why I started this blog. To start conversation with you. To get feedback and learn from you. Or maybe help you kickstart your own side projects.
And this is how it works according to Jeff:
Pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. Until you do that, none of the other advice I could give you will matter.
Expect me to churn out at least 2 posts a month. And please take me up on it.