My Blog Creation Journey: From Idea to Launch

I was always intimidated by the idea of starting a blog, but up until this point, I’ve never found anything worthwhile to write about.

I’m a self-taught dev, and over the past few years I’ve gained much insight and knowledge about the web, I now feel ready to share that with the world.

In this post, I will try to paint a picture for you of how I’m building my blog, and why I think that every dev should start one at some point. Developing it thought me many new things, and with the features planned, there is much more to learn.

In Spring 2022, I had an idea while concluding a client project that had been occupying 10-20 hours of my week for approximately four months. In my newfound free time, I explored the possibilities available to me as a developer beyond client work. Upon discovering Ali Abdaal's YouTube channel, I was inspired to take action. Having read this book and formulated a plan, I was ready to begin.

I was to launch my site in 3 months with 15 blog posts published, and all the planned features implemented.

After deciding to go for it, my plan was to work on it for 1-2 hours every day for the next 3 months.

In the beginning, I was mostly researching with little to no coding/writing.

Honestly, researching gave me a headache. There are so many opinions about CMSs for a blog, that even for developers It's hard to come to a conclusion. That's why I changed CMSs four times.

After a few days of research, I went with Ghost.io and Next Js, I quickly moved through the tasks: Homepage created; First blog post published; Post page created; etc. In the first week, I made huge progress, but then life happened and I stopped for some time, when I came back Ghost was asking for payment. At that point, I wasn’t even sure If I would even launch my blog, so I decided to go for a CMS that offers a free tier.

I started using Hygraph By this time I already had a few blog posts almost fully done, but I quickly realized that the CMS was lacking some features I needed or planned for, there were 3 ways to go from here.

Well you guessed it, I was back to the research phase changing the CMS was the easiest choice.

Since the start of the research more than anything WordPress was popping up, it was one of the candidates it the first place, and it had all the features I needed (or planned for further ahead), the choice was clear.

These are the reasons It's my CMS of choice

I again decided to switch the CMS, and I am now dumping WordPress in favor of Notion. The main reason is that I like Notion more, it is highly customizable, which allows me to create a unique blog.

I’ve been using it to organize my life, my journal is in here, as my habit tracker, goal planner, and now my blog. It will take a bit more work but I feel like this is the better approach moving forward, another reason is that I kept coming to some road-blocks when implementing WordPress, yes there is a huge community but it’s not the same when you’re trying to use WP headlessly, I could find an answer to my problems but it felt very hacky, so in the end, I dumped it.

I've never been much of a writer, or a reader for that matter, but when it comes to coding I've always wanted to get my voice out there. I don't consider myself a master of any technology/topic that I cover here. I'm pretty knowledgeable and have done my research before posting anything, but I'm still learning and sharing my experiences.

There is this quote that resonated with me

Sometimes, amateurs have more to teach us than experts. An amateur understands the beginner's mind. The expert doesn’t

I wish I had started even earlier in my career, but even now with over 4 years of experience, I still feel like I could connect with all the beginners out there, the struggles you’re going through, and how to overcome them.

The topics that I plan to cover are web-dev related, some posts are tutorials on how to do something that I've struggled with and hardly found an answer to online, these will show you how to implement a certain feature or solve a bug,

The others are from my personal experience, story posts with tips, that could be interesting to anyone regardless of their current web-dev status.

Thanks for reading, you can reach out to me on social media.