My first Medium article
Thoughts about writing and publishing my first article.
Publish Date: March 1st 2021 Why should I write and publish? What are my goals in doing so?
There's a couple of things to mention here. First of all, it's a language thing. In an environment where English is THE language, writing in English will improve my skills.
The next thing is documentations. Apparently every Engineer knows how important documenting is - but nobody wants to do it. I'm none of those persons I LOVE sharing knowledge and documenting. So why not getting better in structuring myself when writing and practicing to get better in documenting?
This leads to the third thing: I want to help and give back as I'm greatly benefitting of what others put out there. Here, I want to also give a voice to the perspective of a career changer without Computer Science studies.
And last but not least: I want to build a mix of articles to reference to as in the engineering world it's expected to publish at some point of your career. I want to show myself as an Engineer and future employee.
So many questions... Why Medium as a platform?
The idea of giving back to the platform I'm greatly benefitting from was a no-brainer for me. It's a great platform to publish programming stuff. It has a proper reach. Other engineers publish there, too. So Medium it was.
Thoughts on "owning your own content"
Of course I had some thoughts and mixed feelings about "giving up" ownership of my content in putting my writing out on Medium instead of hosting it on my own site. Here, my dislike for Medium trying to lure you into a payed account after reading 5 articles a day definitely added to the CON. But - even though I'm a big fan of owning your own content - as I don't publish 7 articles a week, as I have next to no reach and as I want to give back and help others - for now publishing on Medium (or maybe also other tech platforms in the future) is ok with me.
See here for my first Medium article ...
What to publish?
As it was now clear to me that I want to write about job-related, technical stuff - which kind of topic to pick? Especially, with this quote in the back of my head:
"Opinions are like buttholes, everyone has one, but nobody wants to hear about yours!"
How to approach writing about topics where apparently everything has been said about already?
Solution: focus on what's most valuable for ME to write about, at this time of my career. Focus, on what brings ME forward in learning and growing.
In that sense my intention was to not write for others in terms of proving that I'm extra smart and bring new Einstein-ishy insights. I intentionally wanted to try to let myself do mistakes.
So I looked for small topics I could get familiar with rather easily - I then selected the topic favicons as I was working on better implementing them anyhow.
Focussing on the above should also help me to fight Imposter Syndrome. Everyone has been a starter at some point, right?
Techniques - Photoshop, Medium, et all
To be honest, figuring all of this out delayed my ambitious time goal quite a bit.
Ambitious, as I was assuming while having the article in my head written down already, I will have it written down for real in 2 hours - not.
I needed to figure out so many things.
I re-learned Photoshop Elements on the way. I used to work with Photoshop CS5 back in the day and very infrequently Photoshop CC so I needed to figure out how all of them differ and what possibilities Photoshop Elements has.
As the last time I did gifs has been around 2009, I needed to figure out how to do them with free tools out there, also finding the tools fitting for my needs. I ended up using the Gyazo gif app. This tool will give you a 7 seconds max gif. I didn't even register on that website as you can immediately download either a gif or a video without registering. At the moment I'm still figuring out, if I need to put both through Gifski to get a better result. I'm not done with looking into that and decided for the first time publishing to be ok with the outcome.
And of course I also needed to find out how Medium works, the shortfalls, the options, especially when it came to file sizes of images and gifs. Medium in general seems to be sufficient to work with but then again for someone coming from a digital media designer background and also used to work with a quite mighty Pimcore CMS, it's too limited. Why, for example, can't I have a proper drop shadow for images?
Conclusion
As I now know how to work with Photoshop Elements, gifs and Medium, I will be faster regarding the techniques the next time. What I came to notice though is, that as an overthinker I literally reflect over everything I write at least 4 times. Here, I want to get better in have things sound good at the first go.
Language is not necessarily a hindrance but then again, it is. Sometimes phrasing something takes longer than it would in my first language.
...lead to some insights Getting familiar with the topic I'm writing about AND at the same time writing the article cost me time as I needed some extra rounds for rephrasing, restructuring and updating content. That's ok and I will plan for this in the future.
Generally planning for more time is a good idea. There's no need for pressure, so I will always take the time to properly set up an article, collect thoughts, structure them and create the content needed. I would also plan to let a first draft sit a night and iterate on it until satisfied. The key here is, set realistic publish dates. And then PUBLISH.
Last thought: Since time of publishing (5 days) I had 3 views on that article so it's really not worth sweating publishing - just do it.