Neil is blogging...

Neil is a little responsible for this series - a few weeks ago he wrote a post - Blogging about blogging, just this once - which along with Terence's post at about the same time got me thinking about doing this. So thanks mate - just what I needed, another side project 😛

What is your blogs URL?
neil-vass.com

When did you first start blogging? Do you remember your first post? Is it still online?

Only 2 years ago, so yes my first post is still around on the same blog I'm using now! Two people had asked me a very similar question just a few days apart. When a third asked something closely related that was a good prompt to put all my thoughts together in one post - saves me retyping / re-saying it any more, and hopefully it'll be useful to people I don't know too.

Giles Turnbull's Agile Comms Handbook says blogging can be like putting addressable parts of your brain on the internet, I like that phrasing.

The post was about communities of practice causing solos: https://neil-vass.com/on-communities-of-practice-causing-silos/

What platform did you start with?

I went with a managed hosting option – get domain registered, WordPress hosted, all covered by an easy-to-use interface so you don’t need to know any of those details and can just write posts.

I knew it’d be very, very easy for me to get drawn into spending hours on tech stack choices and tinkering with various ways to set up a site. It’s hard enough to make time to write the kind of posts I want to share, and get into a regular writing habit, so I decided to spend as little time as possible on the setup. One web search for a recommendation on simplest way to get started, picked the first one that looked reasonable, and did the minimum to get it ready to post.

This was absolutely the right choice – I might still be messing about with options today if I hadn’t just ignored it! But I’ve had a few annoyances with my choice so I’m starting to look at something different.

What do you use now?

Still the same stack, but I've just decided to explore what else might work better. I found that neil-vass-2.com was available for just one penny for the first year.

There's a fair chance that I'll never make enough time to do anything with that, or that I'll try lots of things and conclude that my first choice was actually the best one.... but I'm hoping to find something new.

Do you remember the first blog/blogger you regularly followed?

codinghorror.com, from Jeff Atwood – early in mt software engineering career this had all kinds of interesting and helpful ideas and links.

What is the biggest benefit you get from the practice of blogging?

"What *do* I think about this?" is a really nice prompt that I feel again and again when I try to write about a topic. It helps me reflect on what I've tried, think about where else I can learn things, and put it all together into a handy write up I can read back in future.

Do you have a writing routine for your blogging?

Wherever I can find time for it! My biggest enemy is prevaricating, trying to get something exactly right. So I just try to find an hour or so where I can, and look to publish not very many sittings after I start a post.

Get it to a place where I'm fairly happy, then press publish and start proof reading in live - this is not the classic editorial process but it definitely motivates me to get things corrected or improved before anyone else on the internet sees it!

I'm in Emily Webber's Agile in the Ether community, in the slack for that a few of us use a #blog-club channel (regularly renamed #excuse-club and other jokes as we sometimes seem to write more about reasons we can't blog this week rather than blogging). It's very helpful to have encouraging other people to blog at the same time as you, give feedback, and just help remember that you think blogging is something you want to make time for.

What advice would you give somebody who is thinking about starting blogging?

Go for it! Your ideas are worth sharing.

A long time ago I saw a talk from you, Matt, where you said "I imagine I'm writing for an audience of one: future Matt". That kind of idea really helps me get over the "will anyone care" and "should I press publish" hurdles. If writing it or looking back on it is useful for you, that's fantastic. If it's useful for anyone else too then that's a bonus.