It’s funny how this blog only took a couple of hours to get going, a few more hours spent doing a couple posts and yet it feels like it was over 3 years in the making. Back in March of 2013, Rob Conery and Scott Hanselman created a free and always available pluralsight course called Get Involved! I remember watching those videos and was all pumped and said to my self, I’M GONNA DO THIS! I’d even seen Derek Sivirs Now Movement which also had me wanting to start a blog as so many people started adding their Now pages. 3 years later and I hadn’t started. At the time I was about 3 years into my career and had been working mostly with a fairly large enterprise application. For what it did it worked really well, but it wasn’t anything to write home about because it was pretty old technology wise so what would I blog about?
Several years later and I’ve realized it is exactly the reason that I wasn’t doing new stuff at work that I should blog. It’s one thing to watch videos on Pluralsight or follow some online tutorials for a new technology, but you really need to have something to push you to take it to the next level. If you just watch or read something it really doesn’t get driven home in the same way as actually building something with what you are learning. So what better reason to build up some throw-away code while learning something than to potentially have something to blog about later with examples ready to go! Hey maybe it wont always be throw-away code!
Still, I’ve been thinking those ideas for about a year and I still didn’t pull the trigger until a couple weeks ago. So what was holding me back? Fear for sure as I would be putting my thoughts and ideas out on the internet and while things might be new and cool to me, they might be extremely junior to a veteran or someone well versed in the technology I’m dipping my toes in. That’s just an obvious reason, but we all have things that will hold us back from doing the things we want to do. You just gotta push through!
So that’s where John Sonmez and Simple Programmer comes in. He runs an email course which challenges you to build a blog and get start showing the world what you have to offer. You’ll get a couple emails each week with some steps to follow and he’ll ask you to send him an email about something you had to do as you progress through each email. I can’t really explain why, but by him turning the concept of building a blog into a course (even though I knew exactly how to do it all) made me feel accountable for going through with a better reason than “I just wanted to.” Funny how the brain works.
So there you have it, my spiel on how I finally got started blogging and why I owe a thank you to John Sonmez for finally getting me writing! If you are like me and always wanted to start writing, but didn’t, you should definitely check out Simple Programmer.
