programmers that don't blog should start right now your future self will thank you when you start earning more money get a better job and learn programming concepts much easier because sometimes it's hard to figure things out and a blog certainly can help with that let's jump in and have a look how this works now i'm not exaggerating when i say a year ago i didn't even consider blogging to be a worthwhile venture instead i thought those people that do it are just ones which have too much time on their hands so what did i do with all my spare time you might ask well i simply sat around watching netflix playing games and really wasting away my potential for the future so what changed well about a year ago when i was stuck at home during the lockdown period i thought i'd give twitter a go now my expectations were pretty low but i thought at least i can interact with other people being that at home i just wasn't doing that anymore what i came to realize is that there were really cool people out there social people and antisocial people like me and one thing that i realized they all do is put out a lot of content both on twitter and as well on their own blogs and this is when i came to the realization that they were making money by doing this now i was interested up to this point i always thought that blogging was just something people do to talk about their feelings or maybe their day i quickly learned that this was not the case through twitter i was able to make great friends like catelyn pitt and danny thompson who essentially taught me that there's so much more to blogging when it comes to development you can talk about the languages you're learning and the features you're creating and you're essentially going through and teaching both yourself and others what you've come across and how you figured it all out just from the learning alone i feel like i've missed out already and i should have started sooner because i know that when i look at my old code it feels like someone else wrote it and i don't even understand it whereas if i had logged it out and written some of these things i might actually remember those concepts now with the lockdown being in full effect and having lots more time on my hands i decided to give this blogging thing a go especially in programming because i wanted to understand how i could possibly make money from it this is where i learned three valuable lessons the first is that most successful developers blog just take a look at examples like dan abramov the godfather of react who has a blog which is well about react or flavio copes who blogs about everything from typescript to react he blogs every day for the last several years which is absolutely insane it's not like they're writing up entire essays they're just talking about tips and tricks and little features that they've learned in their languages whether it's node. js or react or whatever it is but why are they doing this well this brings me to my second point blogging is a way to teach and showcase your skills to get started i'm not saying that you need to be an expert that knows about everything but blogging will help you remember what you've learned and shared with others for example some of the earliest articles that i wrote were about react native because it was what i was learning at the time and it definitely helped me have a better understanding of what i was doing those articles are some of my most popular to this date a year down the track and some of them were about things like react native firebase which even now is helping me get leads when companies are trying to solve problems and they see my video pop up first on youtube or on google and they reach out to me to work with me to try and figure out their problems or for example even react native firebase themselves reached out to me to collaborate together this is what is really awesome about blogging and helps you build connections that you might not have otherwise been able to this leads me to my third point by showcasing your skills you're able to make money in ways that you may have never realized before and i'm not talking about things like google ads where you might just get a few cents when people click on your articles i'm talking about real opportunities for things like getting a job with collaborations with companies online internationally or for example getting sponsors or through affiliate marketing there are lots of different opportunities out there i know that a lot of people like catalin pitt my friend who started blogging a while ago has literally gotten jobs because of the content he's put out learning about this was one of the first reasons why i decided that i wanted to start creating my own content and putting it out there so i decided to start blogging the first step should be easy which is just to find a platform to start logging on there's lots out there but one thing i found is they're not always developer specific for example we've got medium which is a really popular one but they sort of lock you into their content and they're not really made for sharing code snippets there's also things like dev. 2 but they again weren't specific to blogging and more about sharing stories and content sort of like reddit so i kept looking and i came across a brand new platform called hashnote they were specific for blogging for developers which was perfect and when i took a closer look at them because they were a brand new platform i had the opportunity to ride the wave of growth that they were going through especially being brand new but also getting lots and lots of new people in this meant that if i start a blog with them i can ride that wave of opportunity and grow my following as well unlike other blogs where you post up a story and hope that it gets indexed by google or you try to manually share it out on social media and maybe some people click on it hash note works a little bit different it is your own personal blog that is shared alongside lots of other people in the community as a feed this means that it gets recommended to new people and you have the opportunity for people to see your content and grow your audience this is great because it still remains your own personal blog but it's also shared to this community so i wanted to give it a try i reached out to them and they were kind enough to sponsor this video so let's find out what other things makes them special firstly they're free you don't have to pay a cent and there's no hidden cost behind there you can get started with a blog in just mere minutes which is really cool but you also get full control of all the data that you create so that if you wanted to export that data in the future and put it onto a wordpress website i don't know why then you could do that or even if they were to shut down you can extract all the data you've created you also have full access to your following so people who subscribe to you and want to read your newsletter sometimes on other platforms you don't even know who they are or if you do you just know their name whereas with hashnote you actually get details to maybe their email addresses so if you wanted to create a course in the future you could extract those and actually send emails out to notify people of things that you're creating the notification system on there is really cool too it automatically notifies people when you're creating new articles so that way people can stay in touch with what you're creating and of course you can use your own custom domain name which i've just done i've registered twirec.
com and i'm going to create my blog on hashnote and take you through the process of what's involved so that if you want to get started right now as well you can do so too what we're going to do is type in hashnote on google and head to the very first link in here we've got our call to action to start our personal blog what i'm gonna do is sign in with google this will immediately take me to my own version of hashnote where i can start viewing some of the content and customizing it as well as writing my own blog what i'm gonna do to customize this a little bit more is head over here to my portfolio and edit it i want to have a blog on my own url so to be able to do that i'm gonna head to publications and head over here to dashboard here i've got a couple of options for my blog which is currently called adrian huarog i have the option to customize my domain name which is the very first thing i want to do because right now it's on adriantoirough. hashnow. and i want this to be on my own domain and my own domain here is adriantoirog.
com now adriantoir. com right now is just a wordpress site of my old blog and it's not very good so i want to have this done in a better fashion so what i'm going to do is on adrian juarog's domain zone editor i'm going to put in these details here in this configuration to set up custom domains i'll scroll down here and i need to add either a cname on a record to hashnote in my case i'm going to do an a record here so this section here where i believe i have adriantoire.
