This month, April 2016, I set out with the goal of publishing a new post here to jpniederer.com every day of the month. Well, it's April 30 and this will be my 30th post. So I've done it! I'm at the finish line. Now that the goal has been completed, I'm going to take a look back and evaluate the work I've done this month and identify some goals for the future of the site.
Why did I write 30 articles in 30 days? Because I made this site a few years ago and never really used it as I thought I would. Prior to going through this exercise I had only made 13 posts. Many of these posts were published all the way back in 2014. Over this time, I hadn't written much outside of code and emails. Through pushing myself to post here, I not only got to work out my writing skills, but also got to publish my ideas all the while getting to use a site that I built.
In the process of completing this challenge, there were a lot of days where I had no ideas on what to write about. When this would happen, I'd typically default to writing about my favorite writing subject, the Chicago Cubs. Other times I'd just write whatever was on my mind that day. Each day I knew that I had to write about something, so the first thing that came to me would usually be what I'd write about.
On average, I'd estimate that I spent 30 minutes to an hour constructing these posts. The amount of time I spent on each post probably wasn't conducive to quality. Some of the posts were better than others, but as a whole I could've put more time into them and tightened up the end result. Many of the posts could benefit from further research and expansion of the main ideas. Overall though, I'm happy with the work I've done here. I achieved what I set out to do and had a lot of good ideas in the process.
After about the 10th post, I had decided I was going to pull the plug. I had been messing with trying to fix an adware issue all day and had no idea what to write about. What's more, it was about 11 PM and I was ready to go to bed. In that moment, I decided I would write about the adware experience. Looking back at that moment now, I'm glad that I put in the effort and made the post that night. When I started this I actually told myself that I'd be ecstatic if I wrote 20 posts. 20 would've have been good, but getting all 30 is great.
In the future, I plan to post more regularly than I did prior to this month. I won't be posting every day, but posting at least once a month seems reasonable. Another thing I would like to do is to write more posts about software and development. Outside of that, I really just hope that if anyone out there finds these posts that they enjoy them. This site might never become super popular, but as long as it's here I want to make some worthwhile content. Thanks for reading.
Published on 4/30/2016 9:15:23 PM