What are top 10 lessons to write a coding blog?

 Oct. 26, 2017

What are the top 10 lessons to write a coding blog?

I like to introduce myself first. I started to write a coding blog from January 2015 just after I failed an algorithm interview in the city of Vancouver, Canada.  As usual, I felt disappointed to myself, but this time I decided to write down my journey. I set up a goal too high for me to reach it. If I cannot be a top player, maybe I should at least try to be the coach for top players one day. Write down my struggle and failure, make it valuable to others.  

As a first time blogger, a coding blog blogger, the first 6 months to 12 months, I was afraid to write down my thoughts as well, and I do not have a lot of ideas to write. But I start to learn how to organize a blog, how to design a blog, how to write in 5 minutes and have a good blog to entertain myself every time I feel down. After 24 months, I have written more than 1000 blogs.

There are millions programmer jobs these days. But do you find that it is hard for you and me to get a desirable job and advance your career successfully? Is it difficult to find a popular name to relate to good and real story about hard work as a software programmer.

In terms of coding blog, do we have a good brand household brand everyone can relate to? Just be brave, dare to be number one, you should start to write your own coding blog starting today. You may be the one who inspire million programmers.

How about a two year old coding blog called Julia coding blog? That is my coding blog: http://juliachencoding.blogspot.ca/.

Top 10 lessons for a coding blog

1.       Coding blog can be very short. Do one thing a time. Work on one algorithm a time. I used to write a blog to review over thirty computer algorithms, it is hard to organize so many algorithms in one blog. 

2.       Write down your coding practice. Stay focus on coding practice. Write down how you feel, do not make it like a textbook, or journal paper, or a conference paper. Include some statistics to help track progress later on.

3.       Be creative. It is your time, you are the author. Think more about serving yourself very well. How can you learn from a coding blog?  You are teaching data structure and algorithm for the future yourself.      

7.       Have some humor. Every time I like to write down something, I notice that I need to practice coding first, or play a contest on HackerRank, or set up a mock interview. No matter how busy I am, I have to find time to write code. Sometimes, it is embarrassing because the ranking of contest, the poor performance I have on the last contest.

8.       Set up a high goal is always a good practice. Learn to be a coach. 
I do have a nephew who just graduated from computer science bachelor degree one year ago. I like to coach him one day to be a top programmer. I need to prepare early, I am more motivated to work for my coding blog.  

  . Discipline yourself. I often try to choose a topic for my blog to make it more outstanding. Once a while, I will choose a bible verse as my blog title. I like to write something with facts, arguments, and also something inspiration. Avoid risky topic to bring controversy.

5.       Make it casual. I also wrote some blogs about tennis sports, top 10 success rules, and other research I do daily.

6.       Read a lot of your own blogs, and rewrite. I got complaints from my friends about grammar errors etc., instead I learn to write and use a new word in each blog, improve and expand my vocabulary.

More about coding blog

Let me explain how I manage my coding blog as a designer, product manager, a thinker and also a code writer and a Hackerrank contest player.  

Coding blog is more controllable 

1     Write a lot, produce a lot of content. I pursuit a lot of goals but failed to achieve, things are not under my control. But a coding blog published using Google blogger, it is very easy to start and manage these days.  

Blog is my product, and I am the product manager of my blog, also I need to do marketing and invest a lot of time to the coding blog product.

Sports training

2     The past 24 months, I played a lot of tennis sports. I train myself to follow professional tennis player, and use the sports to train myself. I like to train myself in a few areas, sports techniques, new school of entertainment, mental toughness, and how coach educate young players, drills of sports, tournaments, rankings. I need a place for me as a sports fan to document the journey as well, share my stories.

     Long term work 

3      Learn how to get more organized and stay connected to my past work experience. I like to write down my thoughts so that I can analyze my thought process later, sometimes an advanced algorithm and data structure takes months and years to master, like union find, regular expression algorithm, dynamic programming.

     Easy to access

4      It is easy for me to write a blog compared to get connected to a person through meetup or other activities.  Also I like to demonstrate how good a person can be to work on a project. How hard it is to work on a goal, like solving an algorithm problem, how many submissions to succeed to solve a problem on Hackerrank.

    Writing Principles

5     I do not have a mentor to help me to write blogs. I need to find out the principles to help me to write, and also help me to think clearly and logically.

    Bad habits 

6     I have a lot of bad habits to get rid of, like impulse shopping, peer pressure, unhealthy diet, and lack of sports training, competitive sports training. One solution is to build a new good habit, write a good coding blog every day.

7     I worked on my computer science Ph.D. program from 2001 to 2011, but those 10 years I did not build a good habit to write programs for data structure and algorithms daily, research daily. Coding blog will force me to stay on the track to work on my crafting skills, a good thinker of algorithm and data structure.

    Community 

8     I like to figure out how I can get more involved in the community I live, I like to be an educator, engineer, counsellor. Coding blog is not a bad choice.

    Less Democratic

9     I read a lot of blogs, and I know that blogging is cheap and efficient way to publish. Although it is not so popular, it is safe and sandbox to get more experience without worrying about down votes.