How writing 700 articles changed my life

It's been a while since I've done one of these celebration posts. The last one was when I wrote 500 tech articles, and that was back in August.

I write every single day. Yes, Saturday/Sunday included. People tend to think I joke when I say I do. But this blog is my legacy, and if you go through it, you'll see it's not a joke.

I want to spend some time to state the why of this challenge and how far the blog has grown. In the end, I'll dive into what to expect 😏.

Why do you write every single day?

This challenge started on 19 March 2020, and to be completely honest with you, it feels like it was last week.

This was the mark of the first lockdown in South Africa. You know the ones that resulted from the Coronavirus.

Because of this lockdown, I didn't have to travel +/- 1,5 hours a day. That's quite a lot of time. Enough time to learn something that's valuable for me.

At this point, I had a semi-abandoned lifestyle blog, which I enjoyed writing, but it just took too much effort.

So at that point, I decided to write small byte-sized technical learnings.

I bought a domain, which, funny enough, was the reason to start this daily journey: daily-dev-tips.com. Well, I guess I have to do it daily now.

I'm not one to focus solely on one topic. Web development is what I enjoy and do in my day-to-day job. I'm not only working in React; I use other excellent tools in my job. So that decided the "what".

"Byte-sized development tips" (Highly focussed on web development)

How do you do it?

So many people ask me: How, how do you write every single day?

And it's not that hard. It's about forming habits. It turns into going to the gym, getting dressed in the morning, or having dinner.

All things you do because you programmed yourself to do them.

I wrote a detailed article on consistency and how to come up with ideas effortless.

You might also like my article on how I spend my 19% free time.

And if that's not enough, I'll even tell you the secret to my writing process.

What have you achieved?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an old article where I wrote 100 articles, which sparked an idea to do somewhat of a comparison between the two.

The big thing about this table is that you can grow a lot this time!

People like to believe there is a cheat to getting this number, but let me break that bubble: there is not.

You have to put in the hard work and make it happen.

Note: Of course, these are only vanity metrics, and while they are fun to see, they do not even mean anything.

What matters most to me is some of the fantastic emails/dm's/etc I get from people saying they learned something, that they have solved an issue or that I inspire them to write.

That's what matters to me.

What to expect in the future?

I mentioned this before, for 2022, I want to have an unbroken streak of one article a day. In 2021 I took a nine-day break when I got married, but this year should be an entire streak.

You can also expect a completely new version coming out soon! As I'm writing this, I'm hoping to launch it with this article, but I might be a bit ambitious there.

Furthermore, I hope to have some cool engagement and collaborative works with other amazing people.

And of course the thing you can expect most from me: Daily tips to help you and me grow every single day.

(Image by James Clear - Atomic Habits)

Even if we grow 1% a day, we are unstoppable in our growth.

Conclusion

Writing every day has changed my life in many ways:

• It landed me an amazing job at daily.dev
• made me grow by at least 1% every day
• I'm meeting so many cool people every single day.

Besides these apparent wins, it helped me become a better English writer. (Disclaimer: still has lots of improvement). It allowed me to learn about some fantastic products out there. And I even became a Prisma ambassador.

Thank you for reading, and let's connect!

Thank you for reading my blog. Feel free to subscribe to my email newsletter and connect on Facebook or Twitter