"People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it." Simon Sinek.
Introduction
Hello happy people. My name is Fon Nkwenti. I am a Solutions Architect for Vodacom Business Cameroon. It's been more than 10 years since I have been working in the IT industry. All the companies I've worked for had corporate clients as opposed to other IT companies that offer mass-market solutions. I've been doing some technical writing as part of my regular day-to-day tasks which include but are not limited to writing architectural reviews, low-level design documents, technical proposals in response to RFPs, handover documents e.t.c. But all of these are internal and private documents. Unfortunately, writing about my company's products, services, or activities in public has never been promoted. Most probably because it is not quite in the organization's culture yet. But things are beginning to change now. With the ubiquitous availability of the internet and democratization of IT resources by cloud computing, it has become even more important for me as a solutions architect, to think about writing for a bigger audience other than internal stakeholders.
Creating this blog has been quite a big decision for me. Most of my favorite authors and writers have provided a lot of reasons why writing is important. I asked myself why a couple of times until I narrowed it down to a few reasons which I would be sharing with you in this post.
Reason 1 - To be useful
I have the habit of reading 8 to 12 books a year completely and starting but not finishing another dozen. Reading a good book is like having a conversation with the author. Brilliant people have spent their whole lives observing, experimenting, and documenting their adventures, discoveries, and findings, but with about 6 hours of reading, all that knowledge could be mine. I also gift books to close friends and family and recommend interesting books for anyone who shares the same interests as me to read. As I have learned from the errors of great people, so too have I learned from my trials and tribulations. There have been many occasions in my career where I encountered unique problems. Some were solved by researching what other people were doing in other parts of the world to solve either the same or similar problem. Sometimes I do encounter problems that require me to come out with a tailor-fit solution from scratch, but these are not prominent to humanity like the challenges that geniuses like Richard Hawkins were dealing with. I have always admired how Malcolm Gladwell writes and I've always wanted to express myself in a way that makes me look like an incredibly smart person. I have taken months to write up very ingenious articles on various subjects around my areas of interest which are Philosophy, Psychology, Personal development, and IT but I've never gotten around to sharing them because I didn't think they reflected how I wanted the world to see me. Then I came across the following tweet from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits:
"Don't write to sound smart. Write to be useful. If you're useful over a long time period, you will end up looking smart anyway."
The success of the book Atomic Habits is a testament to exactly the importance of the tweet above. The moment I started looking at ways to be useful, I started seeing the limitations in my previous thought patterns. So this time around, I am focused on how I can share actionable insights from my experiences that others can act upon. In the end, I might just end up looking smart.
Reason 2 - To sharpen my thoughts and escape from analysis paralysis
This is something that I already do with my journals. Whenever I'm working on long term personal goals, or when I'm a bit confused about what course of action to take, I usually have the habit of writing down all the advantages versus the disadvantages and deliberating on them before making a decision. As Warren Buffet says:
"Some of the things, I think I think, I find don't make any sense when I start trying to write them down and explain them to people..."
But when you write and share with a supporting community, you allow others to engage with you constructively. It is a friendlier way to battle-test your thoughts and ideas and make them antifragile in return. I believe a good way for me to improve on my ideas is to let others try to find faults in my approach, logic, and arguments. I couldn't explain public writing in a better way than David Perell:
"Writing in public is like inviting guests to your house for dinner/ You have to clean and double-check everything. Just like when you cook a meal for your guests, you try harder when others are watching and your reputation is at stake."
Ever since I joined Hashnode as a reader in October 2020, I noticed that there is a very young, vibrant, engaging, and supportive community. The setup process is extremely slimline and my blog was up and running with just a few clicks after reading and following Syed Fazle Rahman's post Create a personal blog on Hashnode in under 2 minutes.
I believe that blogging with Hashnode would facilitate building relationships with my peers and eventually industry leaders.
Reason 3 - To Document my cloud adventures
As previously stated, I've been journaling and been working in IT for more than 10 years now and when I look at my journal entries, I see a lot of improvements and changes in the way I viewed and reacted to the events and challenges in my life. Then I asked myself, what if I had been blogging about my ideas and adventures online or within a community? Unfortunately, because I haven't been doing that, I've lost the possibility of retrospective insights. There is an old Chinese proverb that says:
The best time to plant a try was yesterday but the second-best time is today.
I've been experimenting and deploying public and hybrid cloud solutions for the past few years. I consider myself to be an expert on AWS Cloud networking technologies but a beginner and intermediate in the other aspects of the cloud. I think right now is the time for me to document this journey so that I can be able to look back and see patterns which could guide future decision making.
Reason 4 - To become a better technical writer
There are various forms of technical writing. I would like to improve on technical writing for specialized topics, providing instructions on how to do something in the form of tutorials, technical reports, technology reviews, white papers, case studies, and press releases. I intend to also try out creative, academic, or business inclined styles of technical writing. I would therefore experiment and polish the various approaches that I feel express what I am trying to share and also take note of what resonates with the audiences I would be writing for.
Reason 5 - To share and inspire
In the same way, all the books, articles, and blogpost I've read so far have inspired me to take action, I hope I too may put out the words and knowledge to inspire others to take positive action. With the experience that I have acquired so far and will continue to acquire, I believe writing this blog will be a positive-summed game for my local and future online community. I always thought that the best way to share ideas is by taking the academic approach with a lot of research, peer review, and eventually a book. I've always wanted to inspire others by writing a book but in the age where attention is extremely priceless and hard to hold on to, I might as well start sharing little snippets of ideas and code. A lot of things are changing rapidly and if I have to take so much time to write about a project, maybe it would be obsolete by the time I finally finish or have the means to publish it.
Why Hashnode?
To start is always one of the most difficult things to do in any endeavor one may take. It always begins first with a vision, then research on how to get there. When the path is not clear, you must do some form of research. In my case, I know I want to be a recognized author or writer in the future but I must begin by writing in public. By default, I chose WordPress, then I began the first step of figuring out how to set up a WordPress blog. I did some googling and YouTubing and settled on a "Start your blog or site in 5 minutes with WordPress" post and started. To set up a WordPress blog, you need 3 things;
- Buy a Domain Name
- Choose a Web Hosting Provider and set up a hosting account
- Install WordPress
I was excited up after looking at the 3 steps above. I then set up some time to start, but I never really quite got to the end. My issues weren't technical, but just a matter of the number of steps I needed to go through to get things up and running.
First of all, I tried to come up with a unique domain name and then I checked on GoDaddy to see if the name was available. A couple of the names I had in mind were either too expensive or already taken. So I decided to get back to it at a later time.
Then I needed to find a hosting provider. I started looking into and comparing the different hosting options from Bluehost, GoDaddy, and NameCheap just to name a few. Then I had never used WordPress before so bought a couple of courses on Udemy.
So many steps to go through after reading an article that promises to get you up and running in 5 minutes.
I was also looking into Hugo but and asked a friend of mine for some advice. He told me to check out Hashnode. So I did some googling and landed on a very short article by Syed Fazle Rahman titled "Create a personal blog on Hashnode in under 2 minutes".
I said wow, from 5mins with WordPress to 2 mins with Hashnode.
After reading the article, I was able to do the following in less than 10 minutes
- create an account
- setup a profile
- Create a blog name
- chose Hasnode's subdomain .hashnode.dev to speed things up
- END!
Just 4 steps required to set up a functional personal blog and all I needed to do next was to start writing. Hashnode takes care of a lot of things for you especially in the beginning so that you can spend your time focusing on writing which is why I am creating this blog.
I can always change the subdomain hashnode.dev and point to my own domain later which is a huge plus for me. And there is a very vibrant community of people like Danny's Cloud, Catalin Pit, Syed Fazle Rahman, Bolaji Ayodeji just to name a few whose posts and participation in the community have been very inspirational to me. I know there are many more features on hashnode but the ones listed so far were enough to nudge me away from the WordPress gang and other blogging platforms.
Conclusion
This blog is here to serve and to be useful to its readers both within and outside of the Hashnode community. I'm currently working on a lot of AWS Cloud Adoption and Hybrid scenarios and would be sharing my experiences. If you need a reason to blog, then I hope this post has nudged you in that direction. If I can do it, then you can. There is almost no initial inertia in setting up a blog with Hashnode. Just sign up, choose a blog name, and Hashnode will take care of the rest for you.
Thanks for reading 👊🏽