Over the past few days, I've been experiencing something like burn out or I should take a break from writing articles kind of feeling but today had this challenge from a mentor/friend in the tech community that I get to wrote about what motivated me to start writing as a developer.
First of all, I didn't have any plans for writing any soon when I started my tech journey. I remember last year, I wrote a few articles linked to Blockchain technology on Medium since this big crypto influencer on Twitter always gives around 5 weekly updates of what happened especially in the Bitcoin world every Saturday and I thought that would be my content ideas then I would look for detailed information of each update. That meant I had picked a schedule of one article per but didn't take me long I lost it and stopped publishing the articles.
For the tech community, I have gone through they have always that we sign up for technical writing sites where I ended writing one or two articles and felt that was enough.
A few months ago, some organization that has a creative blog and tutorials for beginners in development were calling out for writers and content creators. They stated that most of their site users were requested for more creators from the black community to help encourage them to learn and build their career in development as beginners. There I thought I should apply for I got feedback from them and it seemed successful I would be accepted to write some content but I didn't reply back since I wasn't sure about my technical writing skills.
Lucky enough Hashnode came through in early where I attended the first technical writing Bootcamp training and through the speakers, I got to understand and make up my mind to start writing. Through the sessions, we got to learn of the why of writing, how to get the ideas, scheduling, valuing quality over quantity, knowing that you can write about the things you know/ things you might be learning and determining your audience as well as the tools like grammar checkers, keyword everywhere extensions, etc.
So far my motivation has been to:-
- keep track of my learning journey
- share my experience so far
- writing about the things that I want to refer back to over and over.
There's an article like that one that has git bash commands I always come back to it just to be sure of especially when contributing to OS projects
- when attending live sessions either event or lessons, I always write down notes almost word to word and I always think its good to come and convert them into articles like GitHub Africa monthly meetups, and hashnode technical writing Bootcamp, I find speakers talk and share helpful resources that I could refer back to or someone else might benefit from.
- some years ahead I want to look at the content I wrote today or now and might still learn from it, reuse or see the kind of improvements I've made over time
- feedback from other people has also been a motivation and reason to go.
- checking my Hashode analytics has always been a secret motivation especially when I was writing consistently but slowly I'll regain back
Hoping I'll improve my technical writing skills and learning as a developer in order to continue writing more valuable and well put articles but as they say, Practice makes perfect
I'll end my article with this quote shared by Ruth Ikejah
"You don't start writing good stuff. You'll start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff and then gradually you get better at it. That is why I say one of the most valuable traits is patience" Octavia E. Butter.