S03E41 – The Writer’s Bug
Good morning 👋
I started the year with two writing-oriented goals for the year: 1) the book and 2) a new developer-centric newsletter, to tie in with the book. The first shipped independently. I forgot about the second until this week. Sort of. As I begin to see progress daily – heck hourly (I’m building UIs super efficiently in SwiftUI) – it’s made me want to give back to the developer community by publishing technical posts demonstrating how I built specific UIs and what convenience functions I use to speed up my workflow. Based on what I’ve built in a short time (remember up until recently, most of the progress was on the non-user facing foundational elements), I’m pretty confident there will be an audience for it. I know because these are the sort of problems I wish someone else had written for me. Would have saved me a ton of bother and time. But I’m in retrospect lucky no one had as that motivated me to learn by doing. And I expect this to continue to be the case as the solutions I’m usually after are bespoke. I can’t help but be specific in my requirements, whereas most tutorials keep it understandably general/basic. That’s the other draw. Usually technical posts were intended first (and probably solely) for the writer’s readers and not any app they’re working on. It doesn’t make it any less helpful but the root of its purpose arguably makes it less interesting/unique.
By committing to this, I hope for a few things in return for my time/knowledge. More people to check out the book. Build up my audience in anticipation for the iOS releases next year. And most importantly to become a better coder. I know teaching is the most effective way to learn. There’s admittedly a part of me anxious about presenting my code for others to judge, but I’m at an age when what I do is more motivated by progress than defence. It will be clear I’m not the best technically but I hope what shows even more is that I gave it a lot of thought. I’ve signed up to Ghost to get something up asap. It’s not cheap but I want to focus on writing exclusively. The DIY approach may lead to more fun results but less writing. App development is enough development.
Have a great Sunday!
Best,
Bardi