6 ms·

> You almost certainly know one topic well enough to post something which clears that bar of utility on any given day I'm only 27, but I don't believe this. I

by Wonnk13 10y ago

> You almost certainly know one topic well enough to post something which clears that bar of utility on any given day I'm only 27, but I don't believe this. I know just enough to know I don't know anything deeply. Does the internet need another github page regurgitating the same stuff as everyone else?

firasd 10y ago
I used to write quick blog posts some years ago, and post on social media often, but I never wrote something I considered a professional article because of hesitations like you're expressing: it needs to be 'uniquely insightful', it needs to be 'applicably useful', it needs to be 'well written.' Then one day I was like 'screw it' and started posting to Medium. I've written ~7 things so far, quick articles, tutorials, or reposting a slideshow I made for other reasons, and they have all been read and been provided recommendations/likes/shares/feedback to some degree. In terms of career growth, it's not been an instant magical boost, but it's more like 'networking' in that it enables people to connect with you, laying groundwork for collaboration in the future. The thing is, certain people you can reach at a certain time are a unique factor in what drives interest in your writing. Maybe someone didn't see the other github page, but they saw yours. Give it a shot.
patio11 10y ago
Github pages seem to be a very suboptimal way to publish for professional purposes unless you decide to design them, since the credit for whatever you publish there goes to Github rather than to you. (Not an exaggeration, either: I got quoted in the BBC recently as "this page on Github.") I don't know what you know, but I bet it is a lot more than what you think you know. I was 27 once, too. My day job at the time involved scintillating subjects like dealing with edge cases in parsing the CSV file format used to encode the results of the central Japanese university examination. (センター試験) A fun edge case, which you absolutely have to handle correctly, is how to calculate the English subscore for someone who has a medical waiver from the speaking comprehension portion on account of being deaf. I assert without fear of contradiction that if I had published on that topic, in Japanese or English, I'd be the world's leading publicly accessible authority on that question. How many posts in that genre would it take to totally own that file format, which is only documented in a single out-of-print booklet whose copies are guarded like cherished relics of an ancient civilization the likes of which we'll never see again? My over-under is ten. There are higher saliency problems in the world than that CSV file -- oh goodness, are there -- but there are hundreds of people with hiring authority who care about that CSV file very keenly indeed. (I'd not particularly recommend working for any of them, but one problem at a time right.) What's the weirdest problem you've solved in the last year?
- hawkice 10y ago
  In addition to writing what you've learned from all the tasks you've done professionally for a good reason -- and since that reason is good, people who hire will care about your ability to do it -- you can also write (in a positive and professional way) about things you've done for no reason. Five years ago I had a boss with a, shall we say, keen eye for backwards compatibility. One of the strange rabbit holes we went down was building a jquery widget to implement the input[placeholder] attribute for browsers that did not support it. This turns out to be bizarrely complex if you want e.g. the cursor to focus before the placeholder text. And that _could_ be seen as a waste of time, but it would be perfect for a blog post talking about how to build something we all are familiar with (and likely transitioning into a discussion of the Shadow DOM) that establishes a reasonable amount of credibility. [Edit: that's not even the most interesting one from that job, either -- while I didn't work directly on it, a clever coworker figured out how to write a client side collage builder that supported both download AND IE6, which is bordering on genius. I've heard him explain how he did it, and it would have to be a series of blog posts, there's just so much there -- obviously the median boss would have let him just use imagemagick on the server.]
- donmatito 10y ago
  What is a good place to plant such flags? Personal domains? Medium? I've started writing a couple of posts on conversational interfaces recently. Having them linkable from Medium was definitely a key to land more speaking at events, in turn enabling potentially freelancing & consulting gigs (not closed yet), as well a good credibility and ice breaker when reaching out to interesting people
takno 10y ago
The world doesn't need another CV or an application form where I talk about a particular challenge I faced and how I overcame it. I still fill those out.

by Wonnk13 10y ago

firasd 10y ago

I used to write quick blog posts some years ago, and post on social media often, but I never wrote something I considered a professional article because of hesitations like you're expressing: it needs to be 'uniquely insightful', it needs to be 'applicably useful', it needs to be 'well written.' Then one day I was like 'screw it' and started posting to Medium. I've written ~7 things so far, quick articles, tutorials, or reposting a slideshow I made for other reasons, and they have all been read and been provided recommendations/likes/shares/feedback to some degree. In terms of career growth, it's not been an instant magical boost, but it's more like 'networking' in that it enables people to connect with you, laying groundwork for collaboration in the future. The thing is, certain people you can reach at a certain time are a unique factor in what drives interest in your writing. Maybe someone didn't see the other github page, but they saw yours. Give it a shot.

patio11 10y ago

Github pages seem to be a very suboptimal way to publish for professional purposes unless you decide to design them, since the credit for whatever you publish there goes to Github rather than to you. (Not an exaggeration, either: I got quoted in the BBC recently as "this page on Github.") I don't know what you know, but I bet it is a lot more than what you think you know. I was 27 once, too. My day job at the time involved scintillating subjects like dealing with edge cases in parsing the CSV file format used to encode the results of the central Japanese university examination. (センター試験) A fun edge case, which you absolutely have to handle correctly, is how to calculate the English subscore for someone who has a medical waiver from the speaking comprehension portion on account of being deaf. I assert without fear of contradiction that if I had published on that topic, in Japanese or English, I'd be the world's leading publicly accessible authority on that question. How many posts in that genre would it take to totally own that file format, which is only documented in a single out-of-print booklet whose copies are guarded like cherished relics of an ancient civilization the likes of which we'll never see again? My over-under is ten. There are higher saliency problems in the world than that CSV file -- oh goodness, are there -- but there are hundreds of people with hiring authority who care about that CSV file very keenly indeed. (I'd not particularly recommend working for any of them, but one problem at a time right.) What's the weirdest problem you've solved in the last year?

hawkice 10y ago
In addition to writing what you've learned from all the tasks you've done professionally for a good reason -- and since that reason is good, people who hire will care about your ability to do it -- you can also write (in a positive and professional way) about things you've done for no reason. Five years ago I had a boss with a, shall we say, keen eye for backwards compatibility. One of the strange rabbit holes we went down was building a jquery widget to implement the input[placeholder] attribute for browsers that did not support it. This turns out to be bizarrely complex if you want e.g. the cursor to focus before the placeholder text. And that _could_ be seen as a waste of time, but it would be perfect for a blog post talking about how to build something we all are familiar with (and likely transitioning into a discussion of the Shadow DOM) that establishes a reasonable amount of credibility. [Edit: that's not even the most interesting one from that job, either -- while I didn't work directly on it, a clever coworker figured out how to write a client side collage builder that supported both download AND IE6, which is bordering on genius. I've heard him explain how he did it, and it would have to be a series of blog posts, there's just so much there -- obviously the median boss would have let him just use imagemagick on the server.]
donmatito 10y ago
What is a good place to plant such flags? Personal domains? Medium? I've started writing a couple of posts on conversational interfaces recently. Having them linkable from Medium was definitely a key to land more speaking at events, in turn enabling potentially freelancing & consulting gigs (not closed yet), as well a good credibility and ice breaker when reaching out to interesting people

takno 10y ago

The world doesn't need another CV or an application form where I talk about a particular challenge I faced and how I overcame it. I still fill those out.