May 11, 2021

Issue 03: One year of learning, writing, and building in public

Hi there friend 👋

This issue came out a little bit later than I'd have liked to as I was preparing a move and interviewing throughout March and April. However, despite being so busy, I still got reminded of a pretty big milestone recently: It's been one year that I started to learn, write and build in public!

While it was not the easiest thing for me to do, I still managed to follow the plan I laid out back in April of 2020, and even exceed what I originally hoped to accomplish. At the center of this "Learning in public" plan was content creation: being public about what I learned helped me to come up with a lot of new blog posts in a year, improve my writing skills and also build a pretty big audience (at least big to me) of some of the most awesome people on the internet (and yes that includes you! 🤗).

Thus I wanted to dedicate this issue to giving you a look behind the scenes at my writing process, how I come up with ideas and share them when it comes to producing content/blog posts.

Coming up with ideas

This part was always hard for me, however, the good thing when learning or building in public is that the ideas flow naturally. In my case, they fell mainly into 2 categories:

General curiosity 🤔

To simply put it: this is the category where I share what I set myself to learn. I gave myself the objective last year to learn SwiftUI and Framer Motion, after sharing my process and the milestones I reached on Twitter, I was able to come up with a few blog post ideas to summarize what I learned. For those, I always tried to come up with some more subjective/personal take on my learning experience:

• obstacles, blockers I encountered
• challenges I overcame
• simplifying complex ideas through fun/visual examples

Connecting the dots 👨‍💻

Two completely separated topics I learned independently from one another might make sense to connect to solve a very specific problem. These two topics might already have an article or a series of articles about them, but summarizing them with my voice and point of view might make it easier for the next person who has that same problem.

An example for this category would be my blog post about generating screenshot of my code snippet with serverless, which describes 2 distinct problems to solve:

1. how to take a screenshot of a webpage
2. how to deploy a serverless function.

One could learn about both solutions to these problems separately, however, if a developer has this specific problem to solve (a serverless function that takes a screenshot of a webpage), my blog post is a one-stop-shop!

From ideas to valid blog post topics

Although having ideas is great, sometimes it's not enough. To find out whether a full blog post can stem from an idea, I need to find an answer for the following questions:

• why is this specific idea interesting to write about?
• do people care about this subject, or is it useful to them?
• do I bring something extra or original to the conversation with my perspective?

If I can feel confident that a specific idea answers all those questions, I then try to come up with a layout and a series of bullet points of subjects I want to tackle in that upcoming blog post. From this point on, I'm confident about my subject and can start writing.

Sharing while writing/building

This is the key to my writing process and to get my audience interested in what I'm doing: I share bits and pieces of my blog post continuously while it's being written, or snippets of code of whatever I'm building. It was a great way for me for 3 reasons:

1. More people are aware of what you're writing about. They ask questions, bounce off ideas with me. Some of those even end up course-correcting the blog post itself! For this one, I love sharing the widgets/interactive examples of my next blog post with my audience even when those are far from finished.
2. Accountability. I shared that I'm writing something or working on something, some people have expectations, I now have to ship it!
3. It completes the "Learning in Public" experience. Similar to how I share my learning process, I share my writing process.

I sometimes got more engagement on tweets showcasing my process than the final product and I continuously see that on Twitter, from writing a blog post to building a company: people simply love the transparency and the process, and the more you share about it the more likely they will connect/engage with you and like what you come up with.

What's next?

Although I've accomplished a lot in a year, I do not plan on stopping! I have many things in progress and also lots of upcoming ideas:

• I've been rebuilding my blog from the ground up, migrating from Gatsby to NextJS, and getting close to release it (My personal website will also have the same treatment). Here's the secret link just for you if you want to take a look 👀. Not everything is perfect yet! There are not many visual differences but I've improved the overall performance of the site quite a bit. I'm still waiting on a few things from Netlify before I can deploy the site to production (and yes I will write about all this once it ships!).
• Once this lands, this will unlock quite a few things for me. I plan on adding a permanent Learn In Public page to my blog. This way it will be easier for current or new readers to find out what I'm currently working on!
• Find my next big topics! I have some ideas, like deep diving again in SwiftUI (I'm waiting until after WWDC for that to guarantee that my content is up to date) or finally getting into ThreeJS and creative coding in general.
• Go through some of my other blog post ideas about things I've learned recently like "Javascript under the hood", "Static Tweets in MDX" or some of my "NextJS performance tips" I learned about.

That's it for this one! As always, don't hesitate to reply to this email to give me feedback or if you have questions about some aspect of my writing process I may have not touched upon in this newsletter.

Until the next one, have a wonderful day!

– @MaximeHeckel

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Want to check out other topics I wrote about? There's a lot of great content waiting for you on my blog 👉 blog.maximeheckel.com