My Blog and My Career (speedrun)

What topics to blog about usually is not a challenge. My challenge is usually to go through the meta work like breaking a small coding / or other project into digestible pieces. Career wise exactly this though has been very important to where I got (I think).

When studying, writing papers, seemed so much easier to me, because I had been writing on a regular basis since at least 2005 in my free time and on my own domain. When tutoring or working in mixed-competency groups it made it easier to share knowledge and explain things to fellow students and creating a couple of after-hour workshops. I only recently got a very nice message from somebody who attended one of those about WordPress that I almost had forgotten about.

Secondly, when studying, this very blog helped me to score some project in the spare time a student usually has, well that wasn't only the thing, but I had to read and write a lot of stuff and my co-students saw that. Here everybody could read it and get an impression of who I was and what I was doing with my time. (Oh, almost forgot, writing books becomes easier with blogging experience too).

When I became a (web related coding stuff) teacher for young adults with autism in a government program to provide specialised education to the ones with hidden talents. It's not so much that the talents are hidden in my opinion, but that conventional methods to increase them or to apply them meaningfully, fail (take that, neurotypicals!). I kind of stumbled into this job and I was worried about my Danish skills, about me being a little weird or not fitting in since I had not studied anything that would qualify me to teach anyone. I had studied Media and Coding.

Being a teacher I had to produce learning resources and evaluate third party ones (Microsoft, your books are awful). I somehow feel that this was quite like blogging tutorials, it probably also made my tutorial writing better.

Two years into my career I wanted to try some more stuff and get out of universities or schools and try the real life: being a developer. Actually I've only been working as a developer full time for 14 months now. It sounds a little crazy writing that, because it's always been part of what I do. My blog helped getting me the jobs I guess, but more the knowledge that I gained through creating them, less the prestige value. Maybe it's the display of doing something without directly deriving value from it.

In fact, my job search was so much fun, but disappointingly short (you meet cool people!), that I could blog about that too: getting a job in tech (wow, now it's getting meta).

A year being at the same company I think I've fully understood the value of documentation of code bases, of servers, of processes. It's pain without documentation. Writing documentation is kind of like writing blog posts, except that nobody wants to write it. Good documentation and knowledge sharing will make everything go faster and better. Do it anyways.

Blogging is great for your career, we get it Jonathan.

1. code
2. code
3. code
4. operations
5. blogging
6. photo & video (that's moved to gegenwind.dk btw)

So if something in the future might appear a little off brand, it's because I'm re-scoping a little, don't worry. Chances are only 5 people will be reading this post anyways, because the giant share of my last years 149000 pageviews come from search engine result pages or referrals. (Go subscribe, ffs!)

Topics that I want to get more into over the course of this year are:

• blogging and self branding (not the hot iron kind)
• education (maybe I'll be able to even have some sessions, working on it)
• business (yawn, but it's important!)
• stuff I find cool (like bands and videos and things)
• events in tech and society I would like to comment on

Ideally I'll manage a more than a post per week, let's see how that will go ;)