I’ve been listening, in the past few years, to a lot of entrepreneurship and blogging related podcasts. Add to that a lot of reading. I knew, for a long time, that a blog will help me brand myself, and will give Google something to return when searching my name, due to my social networking non existence. But I didn’t do anything about it.
One reason is pure laziness (I mean, having very little time with my full time high tech job, commute and parenting two children. But also laziness).
But there were two more reasons:
I got many good tips from various podcasters and bloggers, dispersed over multiple locations and time, never all in the same view.
A lot of the tips and guides are very high level. They give valid and important recommendations, which are almost at the philosophical level. I needed someone to hold my hand, while giving that necessary little kick in the back side.
Enter John Sonmez and his blog course
John has many software development related guides, across several platforms.
His headquarter is at http://simpleprogrammer.com/ where he posts great content. It also serves as a platform to display some other developer centric products.
John is well known for his uber productivity. In the time you went over this post, he probably had three blog posts, a Pluralsight course and healed a leper.
More relevant to this case, however, is his over the mail free blog course (which can be found at http://devcareerboost.com/blog-course/).
It’s actually a bunch of well summarized tips and guides, sent with enough time between them, so you can finish with the first one when the next comes along, saving you the need to cache the information from the earlier mail in your head.
I would very much like to give you some summarized examples from the course, but it will be pointless. The length of each mail is a Goldilocks level of “just right”. If I summarize it, it will remove important data. If I elaborate, my explanations will become less efficient than the source. So, I can only recommend trying it out (again, free).
This very blog post is recommended by the course. I write about the course, link to it, and John can enjoy my one reader (thanks mom). But guess what – there’s actually a list of blogs that were incepted by the blog course, over at http://simpleprogrammer.com/blogging-course-graduates, so on top of good tips and guides, people can also expected some “Simple Programmer” traffic.
This is both smart and just plain nice.
Nice post! I’m also inspired by John Sonmez to start my blog.
Goodluck to you blog!
Congratulations on your blog! I have been blogging for about 18 months now and I’m so glad that I did because it helped me get a better job, helped me structure my thoughts better, and lead to me discovering many other great blogs out there, such as this one!