How To Blog and Give Zero F***s.

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? Where the hell of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. I don't like to edit the articles that I read, but this author likes to say a lot. So where she says you'll hear I'm doing this for a few reasons. One is I want to stay true to the author's intentions and her freedom to use the word all the time. I don't want to be marked as explicit in iTunes, and I want the show to be as family friendly as possible.

So this is the compromise I've come up with. So just as a warning, there are gonna be lots of in this article. How to blog about code and give 0 fucks, by Guran Means. I'm frustrated right now. I've been looking for someone to write about a technology that tons of people have no doubt used, and I'm coming up short.

Really, this is my own fault because I was hoping I'd find someone who wasn't a white male to address the topic. There's nothing wrong with a white male addressing the topic, but I've been recommending a lot of white males to write about technologies. And I was hoping to put my money where my mouth is in terms of my hopes for the diversity of the field in which I work. I checked bunch of the related repos on GitHub and found that the maintainers were white guys and the committers were white guys and the people filing issues were white guys. So I checked the following lists of related Twitter accounts and found more white guys.

The few women I found either didn't have a blog or had tumblers full of inspirational quotes and cupcake photos and shit, which is fine, but not what I happen to be looking for an expert on. And so this is how I became frustrated, because I don't want to hit up the people I know over and over again, and I need a way to know people are interested in and knowledgeable about certain topics. And the Internet was giving me a you. Which brings me to the subject of this post, which is that you, developer in an underrepresented group who hopefully received this link somehow through the magical machinations of social media, should be blogging more. I need you to blog more.

Little future developers who look or act or dress or think like you need to blog more. Your slightly confused and defensive developer community needs you to blog more. Please, please, please, please. And if you are like, I give 0 about what those people need. I need to get off work at 6 and build charming bird houses or customize my bicycle or something.

The best part is giving 0 is totally fine. See, if you were an ambitious type, you wouldn't need me to prevail upon you to blog more. You would be doing that and speaking at conferences and merely on your way to becoming the next Marissa mayor, and that would be just fine for everyone. But there are a lot more non Marissa Mears in the world than there are Marissa Mears, and those people need representation. Lest we get into our obsessive little developer heads, that if you are not constantly being the very best at everything, you should just go home.

We need blog posts that aren't about big fluffy TED topics like programmer diversity and are instead about that stubborn and reprehensible bug you spent 5 hours on today because you couldn't find a damn thing on Stack Overflow. So here are some simple guidelines for blogging about code, while giving barely any f at all, from someone who used to do exactly that and still has a job and outside interests too. No quality control. Quality control. If you wanted a code review, you'd put it on GitHub.

Am I right? It's an idea or a solution or just a list of links. If you start thinking that for even one second that isn't valuable, try to picture you yourself finding such a thing when you started your day this morning and all the agony and yak shaving it would have saved you. The Internet is full of horrible crap. If your horrible crap is at least well intentioned, it's probably a step up from that other horrible crap.

You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to convert your glorious tabs to spaces or even spell check the damn thing. Just hit post. The worst thing that will happen is nothing, which brings us to assume no one will ever see it. People don't click on every link they see in a Twitter bio or a GitHub repo.

This is great. It means that there's nothing for you to be embarrassed about. It means no haters will leave you nasty comments about how you shouldn't dent with spaces. It means your blogging is a nice record for you. Of all the problems you struggled with and overcame that, believe me, you will completely forget ever happened if you don't write them down.

If you don't want it to, it never has to become anything more than that. Assume no one will ever see it. Write like yourself. Writing is not fun if you have to stress over it. But if you can entertain yourself with it, it can be.

So I apologize for the excessive, even for me, sweariness of this particular blog post. But I will also tell you that it is getting written a shitload faster than things I try to write in a professional and grammatically correct voice. If you want to, quote, write a whole blog post that has nothing but code examples and reaction GIFs, that is valid as heck. Write it without capitalization or apostrophes. Who cares?

They say you should write drunk and edit sober, and the thrill of getting something written down really quickly and in a way that amuses you is not unlike drunkenness, but also drink. Or if that's not your vice, eat ice cream. Have America's Next Top Model playing on the TV in the background. Reflecting on your work shouldn't have to feel like being at work. Take your pants off.

Get comfortable. If you are currently averaging 0 comments per blog post, it might seem validating to accept each and every potential future comment immediately so at least someone is responding, but don't. Statistically, the Internet is 97% trolls, and you would think that trolls would not bother with a blog where there are normally zero comments, but that would be incorrect. Speaking from experience here, the thrill of seeing a new comment appear only to find out it's baseless and nasty is far, far less than the thrill of seeing a 4 page screed about need to stay in the kitchen and also impeach Obama in your moderation queue, considering all the time that went into writing it and hitting delete. Remember, this is your blog, and no one asked Hacker News for its feedback.

Don't hit post immediately. If you want to not worry about what might happen if other people someday see your blog, Do yourself a solid and never post anything in the heat of the moment. Save it as a draft and come back and reread it in the morning. And if you like it in the morning, it's good. Moreover, if you like it in the morning, you are good at blogging.

If you can amuse yourself when you just woke up, you have done a good job. And if you can't, it. Leave it in the drafts, and don't worry about rewriting it. Do you want to know how many drafts I have saved on this blog? It's a lot.

But not rewriting it is also very important. If you thought it was kind of a piece of the first time, and you sit down to write it again thinking, don't write a piece of Don't write a piece of You will write an even worse piece of Write it later when a new angle or a really clever hack suddenly inspires you, Or not at all. Some blog posts make really good first drafts. Promote it or don't. You might like having a secret little blog where you quietly explain all the things that are wrong with a piece of software that you never ever intend on filing a bug for.

Or you might eventually begin to desire some recognition. Both are fine. I mean, please link to the damn thing somewhere, but you are not obligated to tweet once per time zone to alert the Internet that you have written a thing. However, if you write a thing and you feel pretty certain it's brilliant or hilarious or just really elegantly executed clickbait, you don't have to feel weird about sharing it. The Internet is huge.

There's probably at least one other person out there who will feel the same way. Just please, please, please do it. The same goes for putting your stuff on GitHub and speaking at your local meetups and going to your local meetups in the 1st place, because those can be a lot more intimidating. All joking aside, our communities need to hear from people who aren't the maintainers and the conference speakers and web celebrities. We need to hear more from people who give 0 who never worry about their clout scores or how many stars their repos have.

The big names create an echo chamber where ideas are safe and popular and failure and being wrong are covered up so no one else can ever learn from them. We don't really badly need any more of that crap. We need you. This This article was a huge inspiration in me starting my own blog and then subsequently starting this podcast right here. And, actually, if you look carefully at my album art in Itunes, you'll see a tiny birdhouse right in the middle.

And that birdhouse is there to reference this article when she talks about the person that wants to get off work at 6 o'clock and go home and build charming birdhouses or customize their bicycle or something. Over the years, I've put together this whole mental story about the guy that sits in his garage and builds charming bird houses. And people come along and say, that's a waste of time. Why do you do that? Or they come along and say, hey.

Your birdhouses aren't very good, and I don't like them. And he just says, okay. That's fine. Because this made up character in my mind is not building these birdhouses because he's looking for external validation. He's building them because he likes building them, so he doesn't care about what other people think.

I learned that, okay, was an exceptional response to criticism when I was in high school. I remember my high school physics teacher being super cool. He was probably 24 or 25, smart, funny, and really good at his job. And he and I became pretty good friends. And I remember when I learned that he had graduated from the University of Texas.

And for whatever reason, I didn't like that school, and so I was gonna give him a hard time about it. And so I said, oh, you went to UT? Man, I'm sorry. And he laughed and said, okay. And I remember immediately, I was deflated.

I thought, I'm gonna stick it to him. I'm gonna tell him that his school stinks, and he didn't care. He didn't care a single bit. He just said, okay. And that idea has allowed me to put things out there in the world and not be afraid.

And this idea isn't about being rude or dismissive or demeaning or indifferent or anything like that. It's about not letting other people's opinions be the means by which you find validation. Because if you're finding validation based on other people's opinions, you're gonna be disappointed. And if you're trying to do that online, you're gonna be even more disappointed because the Internet is full of very loud, very critical people. And that's why the author recommends turning off comments, which is a great idea.

Commenting on my blog is not a human right. If I start attracting a lot of trolls, I'm just gonna turn it off. I don't need that in my life, and neither do you. Do you find yourself wanting to start something or wanting to put something out there? Or maybe you're you're already doing something, but you feel guilty about it, or you feel like you need to offer an explanation.

Well, I just really like birdhouses. You know how it goes. Don't do that. Build the birdhouse. Be proud of it.

Because those people who are being critical and aren't putting themselves on the line in any way, they don't count. Y'all know I love Theodore Roosevelt. So I'm gonna end with one of his quotes called the man in the arena. It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes up short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, Who spends himself in a worthy cause.

Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement. And who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. The Music Makers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode, There is No Speed Limit. He taught me that the standard pace is for chumps and that the system is designed so that just anyone can keep up.

You can subscribe in Itunes by searching for the Musicmakers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm. And as always, you can reach me at aaron@musicmakers.fm.