tl;dr
I share my story and plans for this year.
Go on …
Have you been on conference, meet-up, bar-camp or else? I attended on a few. What do you think about speakers at those meetings? Are they some kind of super-duper-guru at some field? Or maybe they have achieved amazing success? Or they have amazing career? I believe for some answer is ‘yes’, for others is ‘maybe’ and there is group with ‘no’ answer. Are you amazed? I thought so :)
What’s the difference between you and them? It’s really easy. It’s a the same time ‘no biggy’ and ‘oh my god what the hell’ problem. This is all about moving outside of your comfort zone. Yeah that’s all.
That’s because if you do this you’ll expose yourself for whole new kind of experience. I can assure that at the beginning it can be scary but it’s really not. You can do small steps but you need to remember to always push your comfort zone a little bit every time. The key part is that you need to be consistent.
How we do this
Blog
The simplest way to start doing this (in my opinion of course) is to start a blog. There is a lot of free platforms that you might use. Simple ones such as Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr and a little bit more advanced like GitHub pages and much much more advanced that need server, setup and other stuff.
Actually that was the way I started to show myself. At first I created personal blog where I put some of my thoughts. I think all of those posts that i shared on Facebook and Twitter to get bigger audience. Then I had an idea to try to reach bigger public so I put few post on dobreprogramy. I had visits and even comments. YAY for me!
Sadly both of which are now kind of abandoned because of my lack of self discipline. What amazed me the most is that even after almost 2 years of inactivity Wordpress blog gets around 100 views per month.
Meetings
As I said at the beginning there are meetings like local groups or conferences. They are everywhere and you should definitely attend them like I did at LubCamp. I successfully spoke at Hackerspace Lublin and KUL.net. I helped in the organization of LDI twice. If you think there’s nothing going on in your local area go check again. I can bet that there is something going on.
From my point of view the most valuable and also fearful experience was speaking at those meetings. The reason is (i think) obvious. I had to express myself and topic that I chose in most fluent way that I could. This wasn’t that how I wanted. There was lots of eee’s, yyy’s’, _mmm’s and so on. But hey I did it and I’m alive! So it’s possible! And also there was possibility that there will be questions (of course there will be) which I can not give a satisfactory answer.
But I need to confess i gave one answer Hmm, I don’t know, sorry. But catch me later we’ll figure it out together. It was very uncomfortable to me to say that and this disturbed me for quite a while. But hey, nobody’s perfect and nobody knows answers from the beginning.
Topics
One of blockers for me to start doing this was finding the topic. I just didn’t know what to speak or write about. I envied people that write posts out of thin air. It was hard for me to find something to write about. But you know what? It is possible. As a developer you always learn something new. You always step on and solve problems. You can even write about you hobby :)
Another tough thing is to forge thoughts into written words. In past i had to spend hours to write fairly short and simple blog post. I know this doesn’t apply for every one. Some people nave natural ability to express themselves on paper. But yeah, I’m not on of this kind of person. I can say that writing strict technical stuff is easier than other topics.
Profits
Writing posts and going meetings takes a much time and effort. Some of you might ask if its worth it? I can definitely say yes. That’s because of general truth “You are moving back unless you go forward”. This applies especially for IT industry.
In that case every possibility to gain knowledge, start conversation, exchange experience and ideas about cases that are difficult is highly valuable. Another one of profits is possibility to make new contacts. That’s opens another doors for you, chances for exciting project with group of people that you know. This case gives career opportunity, learning tools, libraries, concepts and so on. That gives you more experience, knowledge, use cases that are valuable enough to spread the word or ask about them. And now the circle is closing. And now you can easily imagine that snow ball effect is applied and this start to work as self-powered machine.
Personal plans
As I mentioned at the beginning i would like to share my plans for this year. As it’s just end of January i can’t say much if I’ll be speaking at any conference, meet-up or other event of this kind. I would like to build that much of self-confidence in some topic to speak about it. Everything is possible when whole year is ahead of us.
In first post i said in first post i started this blog for few reasons. So i want to write at least 1-2 posts each month. In time i may migrate some post from my original blog to here. Or maybe someone want to help me with that via PR I’ll appreciate this very much :)
Definitely I’ll be ‘visible’ at local Hackerspace meetings and projects. Furthermore i have plans to extend and enhance my new pet project for managing Events which have ambitious name YAMEM. Fill free to post any issues and possible features in public repo