Continuous Blogging

This is it. This is me reaching the end of John Sonmez’s “How to Create a Blog that Boosts Your Career” course. This is me kicking off a new blog. Not my first, but the first I take serious.

I encountered John in the “Market Yourself as a Developer” episode of Software Engineering Radio. He was talking about the importance of people knowing that you exists and what your skills are and of building a personal brand to create job opportunities. Closing in on the finish line of my PhD, I was interested in what he had to say. After all, I want to leave academia for “the industry” and somehow have to find myself a job I want to work in. So I listened. And I visited simpleprogrammer.com, the portal to John’s world.

I quickly realized that John is good at marketing himself and his work. He almost immediately got me itching to join his courses. However, his loud proclamation of the awesomeness of what he was selling also made some warning signs pop up in the back of my head. After all, experts in something aren’t necessarily good teachers of that same thing.

Fortunately, for both him and me, John is following his own advice and offers some of his advice for free, e.g., in his blog and on YouTube. Reading and watching some of his doings convinced me to buy in on his “How to Create a Blog that Boosts Your Career” course.¹ I had planned to revive my blog anyways, so way not get some affordable professional advice? After all, my previous blogs all kinda never really had taken to fly…

For the last two weeks, I got one email every Monday and Thursday, delivering a lesson of the course. I went through finding a theme, setting up the blog,² finding topics, and setting up a schedule. Although his receipts are no rocket science, I got a few interesting ideas and even got his opinion when I mailed him a question. I think the most important thing was having John push me through this. Participating in the course made me commit to take this seriously. Furthermore, it made me commit to continuously blog³ and actively pursue traffic for my blog.

So this is it. My thanks to John. And the birthday of “Academics code.”

1. The subscription to the email course is free, but the companion workbook costs a small fee. I found the book to be helpful, if not strictly necessary. Most of all, it allowed me to go through the course at my own pace. ↩

2. Didn’t follow his advice regarding hosting and using Wordpress, because I recently came to like Jekyll and already have a host I trust with my websites. ↩

3. I even set up a continuous deployment for my blog. ↩