In this article, I will share my future plans with you about this tech blog. People who like to work with ES6, React, Redux, automated testing, and acceptance testing with Selenium, will like the new path.
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You will soon read about what this path will mean to you. Before that, let me share a brief history with you, and draw some conclusions.
Above all, I would like to say thank you to all my past and present readers. I would have definitely not continued without you.
At the time of writing this article, I have had more than 100 thousand unique visitors. You gave me a lot of motivation to continue with the blog, especially after finding my new specialization.
Brief History
I started my blog last January, because I felt I had something meaningful to say. I had read so many good blogs in the past, that I thought I could make a difference myself.
As a team lead, I also happened to be responsible for internal knowledge transfer. I managed to use many articles at work, as we used the exact same technologies you read about.
After a slow start, within months, my audience grew so rapidly, that the original Jekyll theme and GitHub hosting did not seem to be a sustainable idea anymore. Therefore, I started hosting my website on my own.
As you can see from my tags, I experimented with two main paths.
The non-technical path was about soft-skills, namely learning, productivity, hiring. Soft-skills have been in my focus for a while, as I utilized it as a team lead.
The technical path was about maintainable web applications, Mocha, Chai, SinonJs, BackboneJs, Underscore and Lo-Dash. In the last few articles, I started experimenting with Webpack and ImmutableJs, opening up new opportunities.
Some of my articles have become viral. This experience was amazing to me, especially after JavaScript Weekly shared one of my posts.
Some of my articles have been translated into Japanese and Chinese. Thank you very much for getting in touch with me with the idea of translating these ideas, I really appreciate it.
Why did I decide on pausing?
As I said in the above section, I started my blog last January, because I felt I had something meaningful to say. After my last post, I was in an awkward situation.
At our company, we were still using BackboneJs and MarionetteJs. Based on data available to me, my audience was not interested in these technologies anymore. At the same time, I had the duty to continue getting involved with Backbone and Marionette on a daily basis.
I faced two more challenges. First, I got two promotions in my professional career. I became a team lead of team leads exactly when I wrote my last article. Four months later, I became a Technical Development Lead supporting the whole frontend team.
My other challenge was rather personal. The best advice I got as a team lead was that the tasks of the team get done if I can fully focus on my team. In order to fully focus on my team, everything should be all right with me. As this was not the case, I focused on my personal life for a couple of months, in order to keep my well defended work-life balance. Having overcome the challenges I set myself I became happier not only in my personal life, but also in my professional life.
I concluded that some skills were lacking in me that I had to develop in order to live a fully enjoyable life. Fortunately for me, I made excellent use of these skills as a team lead as well. I read book after book, in order to develop my understanding of how I can become a better communicator, a better person, and a better professional, and live a fully enjoyable personal life in the process.
Zsoltnagy.eu Will Be a Tech-Blog
Even though software development has a technical and non-technical aspect, I decided on letting go of all soft-skills, productivity, and career management topics.
If you would like to improve these skills, I will write one article next week introducing another website, where you can learn about mastering software developer careers. I created this website out of passion, as I am convinced that these topics are not handled well enough in the software development industry. Career coaches don’t specialize in software development, and often give you advice that does not apply to you. Others don’t work as software developers anymore, and even though I do like the information some of these sites are offering, I have a different perspective.
This perspective means to you that we will unlock your potential together, based on eliminating the root cause of the problems in your career. Most people are satisfied with treating the symptoms, telling you to negotiate harder, or create a better resume. I believe that there is more to this topic, as it is very important to realize that your own emotions can support or block your progress. Let it be communication, effective deep work, productivity, fear of negotiation, fear of public speaking, the fear to speak up, or lowering your expectations based on lower self-esteem, all the root causes can be worked on, similarly to fixing the root cause of a bug in your code.
More on this topic next week.
If you are interested in an early access to my new website, send me an email! Optionally, feel free to describe your career goals to me. If you describe one thing in your career as a software developer that is currently blocking you, I will personally reply to you.
If you are in a situation, where you need tech interview practice, participate in a simulated tech interview for free by filling out this form. I won’t be able to serve everyone, as my time is limited. However, I will happily offer a couple of simulated interviews to my audience. I will take this offer down from this post as soon as my schedule is full.
The New Path
I worked a lot to become a better lead and a better professional. At the same time, another good change has emerged in my professional life: we have started working with React and Redux. Therefore, I can now fully focus on topics that my audience seems to be interested in.
We have also started working with an automated acceptance testing layer using Selenium and Nightwatch. Even though this topic is not my number one priority right now, sooner or later, I will write about acceptance testing too.
I will also write about trending topics in the world of JavaScript that are worth trying out.
As a summary, the focus of this blog will be the following:
- Maintainable Web-Applications in JavaScript
- React, Flux Architecture, Redux
- Current Technologies in JavaScript
- ES6 and Beyond
This focus may change from time to time, as new technologies emerge.
You Can Also Request Topics
If you are interested in shaping content of this blog, feel free to do so by sending me an E-mail, or filling out this form.
Thank you for your answers!
What’s next?
As I mentioned, I will conclude writing about soft-skills in this blog with one last article. After that, soft-skills will be detached from this blog.
Then I will continue with articles on what I learned about React, the Flux architecture, Redux, and some other topics.
I find it increasingly important to write about these topics, as React has recently become more stable and mature than before. Breaking changes are becoming more of a rarity now that the main version number became 15 instead of 0.
For the same reason, a lot of React content on the Internet has become outdated. There are tutorials circulating on the Web reflecting old versions such as 0.4.
I hope you will find the new topics interesting enough. I can’t wait to get started with the relaunch!
Take care,
-Zsolt