egghead.io developer chats Creating Authentic Content and Developing Yourself with Emma Bostian
Web development is a fantastic field where people, for little to no money, can self-teach everything you need to make a career, and it's amazing, right? That doesn't mean that there isn't a time cost though, it isn't easy, but the internet has an overwhelming amount of information that you can use to teach yourself. Authors who write this free content are the life-blood of the internet and provide an invaluable service to countless people.
However, in the sea of information, it's easy for your content never to get noticed. You wrote that blog-post that killer blog-post on medium, but no-one seemed to have seen it. Where you write your content is important, there are communities like the amazing dev.to that reach a specific audience and are more focused towards engagement, but the reason why you create your content is also important. People can smell inauthenticity if you are writing your content for the sole purpose of brand-building and getting views people are going to notice. Create content that you love and that you find interesting. You don't even have to be an absolute expert to teach, writing about what you are learning helps people learn right along with you!
Learning a discipline you love profoundly is invaluable, but that doesn't mean you should turn a blind eye to other subjects. It's valuable to have a breadth of general knowledge across different disciplines and be able to have high-level conversations.
A huge part of learning is asking people good questions. When you don't ask good questions, you are doing both yourself and the person you are asking a disservice. When you are too vague about what you are missing, and you don't give enough context, it's difficult to get a clear answer, and you are putting the burden of figuring that stuff out on the person you are asking.
Resources:
- Stack Overflow: How do I ask a good question?
- Chris Fritz: 7 Secret Patterns
- Jason Lengstorf: Cutting Work in Half