{"id":2106,"date":"2015-08-20T08:34:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T08:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/?p=2106"},"modified":"2015-08-20T08:37:09","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T08:37:09","slug":"what-have-i-learned-from-writing-200-posts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/miscellaneou\/what-have-i-learned-from-writing-200-posts\/","title":{"rendered":"What have I learned from writing 200 posts?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>TL; DR<\/h3>\n<p>This is my\u00a0<strong>200<\/strong>th post on this blog. I wrote some additional ones for other &#8220;high roller&#8221; sites, which you can see below along with my other most popular posts.\u00a0<strong>Consistency<\/strong> is the sole driving\u00a0force that lead to this point.<\/p>\n<h3>The beginnings<\/h3>\n<p>As I noted in my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/miscellaneou\/100th-post\/\">100th post<\/a>\u00a0overview, it all started with the post\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/projects\/carcassonne-scoring-board-application\/\">Carcassonne scoring board application<\/a>\u00a0which I decided to post after reading <a href=\"http:\/\/jamesclear.com\/make-things\">James Clear\u2019s post<\/a>\u00a0on why we should <strong>be makers instead of just consumers<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<h3>My approach<\/h3>\n<p>I just want to help people by bridging this seemingly\u00a0invisible gap between the <strong>awesome programmers<\/strong> and not-so-awesome programmers\u00a0how would use a bit of step by step help, by making my tutorials straight to the point with each step, without skipping the ever so slightly &#8220;obvious&#8221; parts.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This &#8220;obvious&#8221; part, as our math professor used to joke, usually tends to &#8220;take just a bit of additional calculations&#8221; &#8211; and before you know it, just after 45 minutes of additional\u00a02-3 pages of derivations, you&#8217;re done&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I too tend to go over the tutorials when I&#8217;m learning something \u00a0new, and I feel frustrated when the steps they outline are not complete, and then I have to spend a day figuring it out (sorry, no mister Sherlock Holmes here). I don&#8217;t do this in my tutorials, instead I try to give you the exact step by step that I myself used when solving a particular issue. Also, I tend to welcome you to share your problems, you may have encountered, in the comments.<\/p>\n<p>As someone smart said (paraphrased, as I couldn&#8217;t find the exact author &#8211; if you happen to know, ping me in the comments):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You learn the best when you have to teach someone something.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And this has been my guide idea. Because, I realized that if I can&#8217;t put my explanation on the paper\/screen in order to explain my train of thought, then I probably don&#8217;t understand the core basics behind it at all. Albert Einstein said it best:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If you can&#8217;t explain it simply, you don&#8217;t understand it well enough.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h3>Homerun posts<\/h3>\n<p>The posts for which I&#8217;m most proud are the MEAN stack series posts, which I wrote for <a href=\"https:\/\/hackhands.com\/\">HackHands<\/a>\u00a0(and which had almost 500000 [yes, that&#8217;s half a million] views combined):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/hackhands.com\/how-to-get-started-on-the-mean-stack\/\">How to get started on the MEAN stack<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/hackhands.com\/delving-node-js-express-web-framework\/\">Delving into Node.js and Express web framework<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/hackhands.com\/mongodb-crud-mvc-way-with-passport-authentication\/\">MongoDB CRUD the MVC way with Passport Authentication<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/hackhands.com\/finishing-Angular-TODO-application-deploying-production\/\">Finishing Angular TODO application and deploying to production<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/hackhands.com\/mean-io-vs-mean-js-deploying-latter-digitalocean\/\">MEAN.io VS MEAN.js and deploying the latter on DigitalOcean<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And, the blog2book that I&#8217;ve self-published from these posts:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/leanpub.com\/meantodo\">Getting MEAN with MEMEs &#8211; Deploying MEAN TODO application to production<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I posted the 100th post on\u00a0December 28, 2014. That means it took me 8 moths to write the additional 100 posts (12 posts per month on average (not including the HackHands post which are large, mildly said (last one is <strong>8k+<\/strong> words))). Anyways, not bragging or anything (this is sort of my\u00a0reference\u00a0point), just hope I&#8217;ll manage to keep up with this pace in the future too and that I&#8217;ll be able to check back to this reference point with a yet even better &#8220;score&#8221; give the number\/quality ratio.<\/p>\n<p>Of the other high roller sites, I wrote a post for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.digitalocean.com\/?refcode=974c9bc93d77\">DigitalOcean<\/a>\u00a0(which I recommend wholeheartedly) titled &#8220;<em>How to manage front-end dependencies with Bower on Ubuntu 14.04<\/em>&#8220;, which is also currently in review phase and will post the link once it goes live.<\/p>\n<h3>How did I do it?<\/h3>\n<p>Above all, as <a href=\"http:\/\/jamesclear.com\/\">James Clear<\/a> says (he&#8217;s cool btw, make sure you check him out if you want to build better habits), the most important thing is <strong>consistency<\/strong>. And, the key point about making consistency &#8220;easy&#8221; is doing something\u00a0that doesn&#8217;t exert too much effort from you in order to start it in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>Start small, increase gradually, but stay consistent with a minimum number. So, to be concise, I write <strong>300 words every day\u00a0<\/strong>minimally. Every day. Some days it may be more, but I just need to make sure it&#8217;s not less.<\/p>\n<p>This tends to be a small number, but consider you write consistently for 33 days? You&#8217;ll have roughly 10k words, which is easily 10 posts with 1k words. Extrapolate this to a year and you&#8217;ll have over 100 posts with 1k words each, which in itself is pretty great if you ask me. Ok, true, not high roller pro style, but hey, we&#8217;re in it for the fun and education, right? &#8211; all the extras are welcome but not mandatory.<\/p>\n<h3>What&#8217;s next for me?<\/h3>\n<p>Well, lately, as you may know, I&#8217;m really into <a href=\"http:\/\/ionicframework.com\/\">Ionic framework<\/a>, and I&#8217;m <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/category\/ionic\/\">writing tutorials about it<\/a>, along as I learn the ins and out of the framework. Also, just recently I became a technical reviewer for PacktPub for the book Learning Ionic and I was a technical reviewer for the video Rapid Ionic from PacktPub. <em>I&#8217;ll update the links to both books once they&#8217;ll be published.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Some of my most viewed Ionic framework posts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/codeproject\/adding-admob-to-ionic-framework-application-step-by-step\/\">Adding AdMob to Ionic framework application step by step<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/codeproject\/check-network-information-change-with-ionic-famework\/\">Check network information change with Ionic framework<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/codeproject\/posting-data-from-ionic-app-to-php-server\/\">Posting data from Ionic app to PHP server<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/quick-tips\/handling-ionic-cors-issue\/\">Handling Ionic CORS issue<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/stack-overflow\/how-to-redirect-users-if-there-is-no-internet-connection-in-ionic-framework\/\">How to redirect users if there is no Internet connection in Ionic framework?<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/ionic\/ionic-announces-ionic-lab-a-gui-tool-replacement-for-ionic-cli\/\">Ionic announces Ionic Lab \u2013 a GUI tool replacement for Ionic CLI<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/stack-overflow\/use-ionic-or-cordova\/\">Use Ionic or Cordova?<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/ionic\/create-icons-and-splash-screen-automatically-with-ionic-resources\/\">Create icons and splash screen automatically with ionic resources<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Also, I&#8217;m writing tutorials on the subject of Ionic for HackHands. The first one in the series is titled: <a href=\"http:\/\/hackhands.com\/how-to-get-started-with-ionic-framework-mac-windows\">How to get started with Ionic framework on Mac and Windows<\/a>\u00a0(I&#8217;ll update the link once the post gets published, since it&#8217;s currently in the review phase). Since these arranges prevent me from posting them on my site too, I&#8217;ll make excerpts and just link to them from my blog on a monthly basis (same as with my newsletter; since I don&#8217;t want to be bothering you guys too much with too much email &#8211; we all hate email ;)).<\/p>\n<p>If you happen to like my style of presenting the &#8220;tough&#8221; subjects, please share with me in the comments <strong>what topics would you like to see covered next<\/strong>?<\/p>\n<h3>Cool, but your theme sucks<\/h3>\n<p>I kind of agree on this one. Since I&#8217;m not a designer and I don&#8217;t quite know what I want exactly (shocking, I know; yeah, I bet designers get this line a lot from their employers). So,\u00a0I&#8217;m looking into making a better theme for my blog &#8211; do you happen to have a favorite one, or do you want to feature the one you made &#8211; share it in the comments. I actually may give it a try on Freelancer to find my new theme, the same way I got my new logo designed:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/hitman.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll blog about how this process was refreshingly positive (and not expensive) in my experience, and will link it here &#8211; so, stay tuned because more awesome content is coming!<\/p>\n<h3>See you at 300<\/h3>\n<p>That&#8217;s all folks, see ya at 300!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TL; DR This is my\u00a0200th post on this blog. I wrote some additional ones for other &#8220;high roller&#8221; sites, which you can see below along with my other&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-miscellaneou"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2106"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3046,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions\/3046"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}