Hello fellow developers! Welcome back to my blog. Since now that I have written a few articles after starting my blogging journey on Hashnode, I've decided to start participating in the Hashnode Challenges. The first challenge I've chosen to take part in is the #2Articles1Week challenge! As a part of this challenge, I'll be posting 2 articles per week. This is the first article of the first week.

Learn more about the challenge here.

Why I started blogging

Since this is the first article of the #2Articles1Week challenge, I want to share with you all the reasons behind why I started blogging in the first place and how I'm planning to keep writing articles consistently. And maybe, by the end of this article, you might be inspired to start your very own blog🤩. So without further ado, let's dive in!

I have been considering starting a blog a lot of times. Every time I thought of actually starting my very own blog, I always had the fear of it going south. Or that I might be sharing/writing about something others might not like. Eventually, I overcame this fear and just went with my guts and started my first blog and my blogging journey, right here on Hashnode.

"I did not start blogging because I was good at blogging or writing."

Although I enjoy reading, I'm not a great writer. Apart from taking down notes and writing about things that I'm learning, I don't write much in my day-to-day life. So why am I starting my blog? Well, for starters, when learning to become a programmer, I didn't know anything related to programming, but I still did because of my eagerness to understand it and the passion I had for programming after a few days starting to learn to code. So just like programming, I had the feeling that I might become passionate about writing, hence the reason I started writing.

Motivation

Everyone has some kind of motivation or a reason behind something that they do. It's the same for writers/bloggers, they have their reasons why they start blogging.

For me, the main reason to start my blog was that I wanted to give back something to the community other than just code/project contributions. This is because, from the very beginning of my programming journey, I've been using a lot of resources, almost all of them being free articles/tutorials by amazing creators who want to share their knowledge with others. I wanted to do the same thing for other developers who relate to me, "share my knowledge and experience in programming with other developers, and help them in one way or another."

Writing for you and the future me

I've been programming for about 3 years now and I have learned a lot of new things that I found only a few have shared about and fixed bugs & issues that I didn't find answers for in StackOverflow of Google. Because of this, I think writing articles on similar topics might not only be really useful to other developers, but also for me if I ever face these obstacles in the future. (so this is also like a personal journal)

And yes! I could write about my experience in a personal journal and not worry and be nervous about writing in public, but that wouldn't be solving much of the "giving back to the community part - which is the main reason for me to start a blog" and also I think that when I write it in public as a blog, where many people might read, it will also make me pay extra attention to what I learn, how well I comprehend it, how well I can explain it because I won't like to teach, share or learn something that I wouldn't read or something that is not useful, incorrect or up-to-date.

How do I plan on keeping it consistent?

A lot of the more professional and experienced dev bloggers always say that the primary focus to be when starting a blog is to be consistent with it.

And I agree with this 100%. But being consistent has been a bit difficult for me, being a college student, building projects, contributing open-source, and now writing. Until now, I have been very poor with time management and being productive. Although I get things done at an average time duration, it's just that I think that I can do more if I'm well organized and managed.

And since being productive and more efficient in the things I do (especially now that I want to be consistent in writing and really take my 'blogging' to the next step), I'm gonna focus on mastering this so that I can achieve my goals.

Currently, I'm using Notion to manage my different workflows. I'm still in the process of setting up my Notion workspace to properly fit my needs and improve my productiveness. Some of the main tasks I have to manage are my programming tasks (i.e., side projects, open-source contributions, fixing bugs, etc..), my college studies and my programming-related learning (yes, I'm constantly learning new things and enhancing my knowledge on programming, web development and technology and stay up-to-date), my day-to-day tasks and now my Hahsnode blog. Therefore, I need to create a Notion workspace to satisfy all these. After I'm done creating this workspace, I'm hoping that it will show a significant improvement in my overall productiveness. I also hope to share it with you guys too, so that it can be of any help to ya'll.

Apart from this, I have also found a lot of resources online (articles, tutorials) that share tips, tricks and ways to improve on these points.

And also like I said earlier, I'm taking part in the #2Articles1Week challenge and other hashnode challenges in the future. I think this can help me with writing consistently too. Because participating in challenges can be a really good way of improving certain skillsets, the same way participating in hackathons and other coding challenges can help you in programming. I have a great feeling that participating in the hashnode challenges can improve my writing skills.

Thanks for reading! :)

That's it for today's article, thank you so much for taking the time to read my article. If you enjoyed reading this article consider liking and sharing it! If you are a new blogger, start with the #2Articles1Week challenge and share the link to your blog in the comments, I'd love to check it out! And if you are a developer thinking of blogging but are backing away for some reason, do let me know in the comments below or DM me over at Twitter, I'll do my best to help.

Once again thank you very much for reading this far, follow me on Twitter for more updates. See you on another article this week. Ciao🤟