The one about blogging

It has been two years now since I started writing this blog.

The way I see it, maintaining a blog requires discipline. Those who know me well know that discipline is one of my key strengths.

However, I never dared to take the leap before because several developer friends, whom I admire professionally, had tried and quickly fell by the wayside, usually after the first or second post. Why would I be any different?

I knew that if I were to start, I had to take it seriously. Two years later, I can say that, for now, I have achieved what I initially set out to do: publish at least one post per month.

It all started with a post where I talked about an error that caused Domestika application to lose access to AWS S3 in production for a few minutes.

Normally, I would have saved the solution to that error in an Evernote note, including a link to where I found it. I would also save that link as a bookmark. That was my modus operandi for many years.

Over the years, I rarely actually used those notes or bookmarks when I found myself in a similar situation. Typically, when in need of that information again, I had completely forgotten that I had noted it down or saved the bookmark. To be perfectly honest, it is very easy and convenient to perform a quick search and, in fact, I normally ended up on the same Stack Overflow thread where I had already found the solution before.

So why did I keep saving them? Old habits die hard.

My approach now, instead of saving that stuff in notes or bookmarks, is to write a post. Writing a post is completely different. There have been several occasions when I needed something I had previously written about, and I always come directly to the blog to see what I wrote instead of doing a quick search.

Do not get me wrong, I still save some notes with details that are not quite enough for a full blog post, but I do it much less than before.

An important decision was also which platform to host my blog on. I was pretty sure I preferred not to create a custom solution when very popular options already exist, especially for developers, like dev.to or Medium, which would likely also give me more visibility. However, when I researched the options a bit, I quickly opted for Hashnode. Without getting into too many comparisons, it is exactly what I was looking for: the ability to easily export my posts, write in Markdown, back up to a GitHub repository, add a custom domain, among many other things. Also, in my opinion, it is a platform with a much more attractive look and feel than other options. And, as if that were not enough, Hashnode has a public API that lets you interact with it.

Choosing the language to write in represented another important decision. Spanish is my mother tongue, thus it is the language where I feel most at ease. Furthermore, while Spanish content is growing, there is significantly less of it compared to English, presenting a chance for potentially greater impact on the Spanish-speaking community. Still, I knew the best path for me was writing in English, intending to improve my writing skills and aiming to become a better storyteller in that language.

The only post I have written in both languages so far is the one about my experience at Domestika. The reason was that some news had appeared in the press that, as far as I knew, were not entirely true and I wanted to avoid anything getting lost in translation.

Without a doubt, I still have room for improvement in that area, although I feel more comfortable over time. Sometimes, I still find myself writing the text in Spanish initially, as it comes more fluidly, before translating it into English. This approach, however, involves a considerably larger investment of time compared to writing directly in English.

On the one hand, I write for myself for the reasons I already explained, aiming to keep useful stuff accessible, functioning somewhat like a diary or logbook. While I was job hunting last year, every selection process involved questions about how I do certain things, projects I have worked on, or my experience in general. As time goes by, remembering specific details becomes harder, so I am sure having a post with lots of details will help me be more precise in future selection processes. That is also why I decided to write the series about my experience working for an American fintech as a contractor.

On the other hand, I like the idea of sharing knowledge. If it is useful for me, it might be useful for others too. I am aware I do not have a huge audience; only a few posts have had some impact (according to analytics), but I am proud that the post where I talk about how to learn Ruby was included in the Short Ruby Newsletter. Visits to that post increased considerably after that feature.

Maintaining a blog takes more time than I initially thought. When you have the chance to write about something you have done recently, it is usually quite straightforward, especially for purely technical posts. However, for various reasons, writing about what you do day-to-day is not always possible, either because I have not finished it by the time I want to write the next post or due to confidentiality. It is in those moments that I turn to a note I keep in Notion where I jot down ideas I think might be interesting.

Once I decide what I am going to write about, the next thing I do is make a list of points I want to include in the post. After that, it is time to shape all those ideas so they make narrative sense and are not just a jumble of loose thoughts. This is probably the phase that takes me the longest.

I usually write at the end of my workday, especially when I can finish earlier. I try not to spend more than a couple of hours each time, because I do not like spending the whole day in front of the computer.

In the future, I would like to write more purely technical posts, because I think those are the ones I enjoy writing the most, and at the same time, they are the ones I feel are most useful. Especially when it comes to writing about my approach to a certain topic or about a mistake made and what I learned from it.

And that is basically my process for maintaining this blog.

Thank you for reading and see you in the next one!

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