Hello, welcome to the internet, and my exciting first week

Well, that was a fun week!

I started writing content for my blog and am already changing my strategy. Instead of posting small bits each day, I am switching to weekly deeper posts on web development.

Starting from scratch

One week ago I decided to dust off my old blog and write some content. This blog has taken various forms over the years. I bought the domain in 2012 with some ambitions to write.

Without any sort of system or habit in place, it has withered on the Internet.

Recently, I've been looking for a better way to channel some of my creative energy. When I get bored I tend to think of startup ideas and trust me, those get worse over time.

When encouraging people to think about projects most advice tells you to:

Do what you love

When you are doing something you love it doesn't feel like work. It doesn't drain your energy. It lets you work on something longer and harder than other people. And that gives you time to develop experience and insight in that area.

For me, the thing I love to do most is to engineer. I don't have much preference about what domain I am in. I like working on promising technologies. I like building products. I like implementing new processes with software.

It's what I want to do every day.

I'm very lucky that my job is exactly that. I'm paid to engineer solutions. And there is a difference between engineering and coding. Engineering is:

1. Understand the problems at hand
2. Analyze requirements and ensure they are as correct as possible
3. Iterate with design
4. Promote best practices
5. Understand the entire architecture
6. Ensure documentation is up to date and findable
7. Drive consensus on how to tackle hard problems
8. Create new processes where old ones are failing
9. Listen for problems and help design solutions
10. Teach and mentor coworkers

And more I'm sure I'm not considering.

Software Engineering is more than coding

When you push yourself to be a better and more effective engineer, you need to step out of your comfort zone. Productive engineers need to ensure all parts of the process are working.

I'm always looking for ways to make myself and my team better. I want to help them all grow and create incredible things. When they do great things, I feel good too.

After mulling increasingly poorly thought out side projects for months, I took a step back. The simplest solution is often the best.

I should teach how to be a better engineer.

It's what I do every day. I love doing it. I enjoy teaching and helping people.

We'll see if I am cut out to have the right sort of personality to teach. I believe I do a good job of explaining concepts. Nothing will refine that more than trying to teach the entire internet how to do something.

Now, I'm not the best engineer. Far from it. There are so many fantastic engineers out there. But I'm going to put effort into reaching out to you, dear reader, and say earnestly:

I want you to do great things.

I'm rooting for you. I want to help you frame requirements, design good products, and ship great code. The more you win, the more I win.

To start, I'm going to focus on frontend software engineering.

It's a fantastic place to be right now. There are amazing technologies to build games, desktop apps, APIs, and more. It's a huge area with lots of opportunities.

I'm going to keep things product focused. At the end of the day, I want to help you build things.

I would love nothing more to help engineers be better and watch them create great products.

Anytime you launch something, shoot me an email or tweet. I'd love to see what you did. Nothing is too big or small. 🙂

Site Goals

This is fun and exciting because I'm starting from zero. This blog has almost no traffic. I have 164 followers on Twitter; most of them are bots.

I have no channels of promotion.

You can follow along to be a better engineer and take a journey with me to learn how to build an online audience.

Each week, I will update how the week has gone with a quick update. This will keep me accountable and also reflect on how different strategies work.

My first big goal is to get to: 10 unique views per day.

I'm working to get a baseline of readers coming to the blog. This will require writing content that is useful for longer periods, and getting more of it out there. Writing consistently is the most important thing to get right.

Subscribe to join the journey

If you would like to join me on this journey, please sign up for the weekly email! I am focusing on web development and engineering practices to help you be more effective. I currently am planning on releasing a weekly article.

All feedback is appreciated! Shoot me a tweet or email.

See you around!