Tag, you're it

Kilian tagged me to answer some questions about blogging and it took me three months to get to it, but hey, here we are!

I wrote my first blog post June 21st, 2013 on a different blog than this one. I had just discovered my love for web development and was lucky to have landed an internship with incredible people.

I was studying Media and Computer Science and joined a small ecommerce shop selling shirts. I thought I was well equipped for the real world but boy was I wrong. My first internship days had been challenging. The university courses I had aced were pretty useless, because as it turned out, I didn't know the right things. Like really, it was an entirely new world.

I hadn't touched a terminal before. I knew some things about Java and C++ but nothing that would help me with wrangling JavaScript, PHP and SQL code. I was clueless about the bigger picture and the individual tasks. It was frightening.

Luckily, the CTO and two lead developers took me under their wings (Heyoo Bernard, Patrick, and André! 👋). They leveled me up very quickly and kept trusting me even after my first production fuck up.

If you're curious about my war story; I wrote a faulty SQL query that messed with hundreds of product and CMS pages which someone had to fix manually while I was out. Ouch.

This team setup was perfect for me to get a foot into the web dev industry, but startups are always a gamble. The company went down, the four of us had to look for new jobs and we also had some free time on our hands. Blogging seemed like a reasonable idea to fill the void and we decided to set up the 4waisenkinder (4 orphans) blog.

I used the blog to promote the bachelor thesis I was writing with Travis CI and to document my web development learnings. This was when I fell in love with writing.

The mentioned 4waisenkinder blog was Jekyll-based. Today, and since I started blogging on my own domain, I've had multiple static site generators in use. I started with Metallsmith, went over to Nuxt, and am now rocking Eleventy. All the content is served from Contentful because I used to work there. Using a headless CMS has its pros and cons but at this point it just feels like too much content (over 650 posts) to migrate to something else.

I log into Contentful, write it, do a grammar check and hit publish. Fairly unspectacular.

When I started blogging I was so excited about web development that I had to tell the world about it. There were so many things that I've learned. And there were so many things I wanted to build. It was so exciting that I had a hard time sleeping.

Every time I learned something new, I tried to write it down and make it public. I still do this but treat my blog more like a digital garden or public bookmark collection. When I post something on social media I try to make a note on my blog, too. My thoughts, images and resources should live on my own domain!

Additionally, I've always admired people like Jim, Simon and Chris who are absolute pros at publishing valuable commentary.

There's the misconception, that blog posts must be long and massive. That's wrong. I love opening my RSS reader in the morning to discover posts, notes and thoughts from "my people". There's no algorithm. No drama. Just valuable content. I love it!

After I've read the post a couple of times I hit publish to get it out quickly. I don't see much value in countless WIP drafts.

That said, I do rework posts quite a lot. I usually plug older posts in Web Weekly and always take the opportunity to improve the wording and update things.

New web development features and lesser known facts and tricks. Any time I think "Huh! I didn't know about this!", I try to publish a quick note about it!

I don't think I have one favorite post but generally I'm pleased with some blog features.

Blog posts covering browser features usually include a browser support widget that's always up-to-date. I'm proud of this!

I also try to follow Josh's lead because he nailed and maybe even created a new genre of educational and interactive blog posts. If I have the time, I try to build interactive components, too. They make the posts more valuable and high-quality.

If you're curious, here are some examples:

• Safe flexbox alignment
• Auto-margin works with absolute positioned elements
• oklch() retains perceived lightness for different hue angles
• The relative font weight axis — how variable fonts ease font weight transitions
• hwb() – a color notation for humans?

For the readers. When I started writing, I was so excited about web development that I had to share it with the world. People needed to know, right?

And, I'm not gonna lie, today I know that I'm striving for external validation and seeing my posts featured in newsletters or trending on social media gives me a nice sense of accomplishment.

However, over the years, I've also come to realize that writing helped my career. If you're comfortable in writing, you're used to tearing a topic apart. You're up for the challenge of thinking something through. You know that sometimes you have to dig deeper to understand something and that it takes time to formulate your thoughts. Many people are uncomfortable with all this.

Writing makes you a better communicator, developer and team mate.

Nope. My blog has grown into a fairly large project at this point and there's a long overdue refactoring I should tackle, but I try to focus on my newsletter these days.

I've read so many of these posts so I don't know who's missing. If you're up for the challenge, write your post and let me know! I'll happily tag your response here.