Starting your own blog

Lately I have been increasingly engaged with the developer community. There is plenty to learn from just following conversations that happen on Twitter, in Github repos you are interested in, on dev.to, Medium, well, if you found your way here, chances are you share my sentiment.

However, while I find it very easy to consume information in all forms and shapes, following up on it tends to be more cumbersome. Sometimes when inspiration sparks I'll leave a quick note for later, mental or written, and while a few notes warrant a small exercise, most of the time I find myself moving on to other things sooner than I have the chance to get a deeper understanding.

Getting this blog up and running might just be what I need to stop that. Once this blog is launched in all its glory and drives traffic from all over the world, I will have a purpose to fulfill by sharing my thoughts.

That was sarcasm. Better be explicit about it as we're just getting started setting the tone here.

I have however in the past thought the same thoughts but with less grandious language, I have had an itching urge to launch something and have it be successful, and the success of a blog is measured in traffic, right?

Well, you may think so, and I may agree to some extent, but the primary purpose for me is to have a space to collect my thoughts and ideas, be able to share it with others if I so will, and possibly in a distant future, drive traffic. Joel (not me) said it very well when he wrote about his piece Digital Garden.

Because guess what, once you relieve yourself the pressure of "performing" whatever that means to you, chances are you will start doing just that, or so says my experience. You don't even have to market your blog garden, not so much as notify anyone of its existence. But if you dare, and I have every intention to, you can let it be accessible to the public and share it as you see fit.

All right, that was not the piece I opened up this editor to write. I can only hope that someone one day reads it and is in any way positively affected. That seems like a reasonable goal for my first post plant(?) to have made it into the wild.

Finally, for a technical description of how you can start your own developer blog, head over to 100 days of Gatsby. I don't really see how I could improve their splendid explanation at this point.

BUT, I would like to say this much: Go bananas! Experiment. Document. Share your insights if you will, or just leave them out there for yourself and the occassional visitor who just happened to find their way to your public garden.