150 blogposts later..

How releasing 150 blogposts and articles helped me improve myself

Before to start, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for all the support you’ve shown me throughout my journey as a blogger. Each view, clap, sharing and comment gives me an extra-motivation to do even more. The act of writing is such an inherently painful and hard process. Indeed, you’re directly confronted to your audience and followers. So you must fact-check each assertion. Releasing an article is such a relief. The pleasures of being read and supported by readers that share the same interests as me is so humbling and rewarding. That’s why I wanted to take a moment to say: THANK YOU!

In this blogpost, I’m going to share with you:

what I’ve learned on a personal level

few numbers about my blog

On a personal level

Here I’m going to share with you 4 areas and skills that I’ve really learned or improved during my journey.

English writing skills

Firstly, as a non-native English speaker (French-born), it was a real challenge for me to write tech articles and blogposts in English. But as my priority was to share my knowledge and thoughts with a maximum of readers, I had to overcome these difficulties and improve my English writing skills while releasing new blogposts on a regular basis.

Indeed, every writer gets his own style. A writing style is mainly related to 2 characteristics:

your way to formulate an assertion

the structure of your articles & blogposts

Your way to formulate an assertion is strongly correlated to your language level. So that adds a layer between the way you normally express an idea and the way you transcribe this idea in another language.

This said, after 150 articles I can definitely say that I drastically improved my English writing skills. I found my style and as my metrics show me, I’m understood by non-native and native English speakers. 😊

From introvert to extrovert

I played team sports (soccer, handball, etc..) during 15 years and was captain of the team during 7 years. I spend 99% of my daytime surrounded by family, friends and coworkers — As a lot of people do. This is not what we can define as an introvert personality.

But what I mean by becoming extrovert here, is that I am a way more confident person when it comes to share knowledge with people as qualified as me — or even more qualified.

Indeed, when you’re in a domain with so much confident and skillful people, it can be really intimidating. So you start to apprehend the moment you’ll release an article. After a while, I understood that until now, I wrote to impress this audience of qualified developers. I was far from the former goal of my blog: “share my knowledge and experience in order to help developers and startup enthusiasts around the world”.

After a while, I found this mantra that helped me a lot to stay focus on my goal:

Your blogposts are made for people who want and need to read it.

Very obvious but very efficient!

So now I can say that I’m a socially confident programmer 😅. I’ll never let someone or something challenge this confidence. To achieve my goal, I have now the ability to remove the noise around me. I’m also not worried about what others think. If you think I did a mistake, I’m ready to hear it and put my ego aside.

The art of ignoring trolls

I want to share this good news with you guys: I’m officially immune to troll attacks!

This is directly correlated to the previous section. The purpose of some people is just to try to get an emotional reaction out of you by attacking your work. They know how much you’re passionate about your achievements, and that the fact of criticizing your work will impact you. It’s pure sentimentalism. On the other hand, you have people with commendable intentions that give you constructive criticism and kindly correct misspellings after reading your blogposts. So your goal is to pay attention to these people and ignore trolls.

I’m a better developer

The last but not least: I’m a better Ruby on Rails developer. For non-technical readers, let’s say that Ruby on Rails is a toolbox that helps you to build websites. So now, I have a deeper understanding of all the tools and materials in this toolbox.

Indeed, publicly writing forces you to fact-check each assertion. So for each topics that I treated, I spent hours to read the source code of both Ruby and Ruby on Rails. This was surprisingly helpful. I figured out that several mistaken beliefs were due to the fact that I didn’t really understand the mechanics of Ruby and Ruby on Rails behind the scene.

So the ethic and the discipline of fact-checking everything helped me to drastically improve my level.

150 blogposts in numbers

Today, I wanted to share few metrics with you:

~75,000 words ✍️

I’ve written a bit more than 75,000 words. In comparison:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: 76,944 words.

~4M views 👀

4 million views so far ! When I started my blog, I’d never imagine that so many people would be interested in my work..

3 blogs 🌐

Conclusion

When I started blogging, I’d never imagine that 18 months later I’d improved so much as a developer and as a human being. I’ll keep writing for a long time! My next milestone is 500 blogposts.

Also, I decided to make the jump to entrepreneurship. I promise to release a blogpost to celebrate my first million dollars. 😉

Voilà!