Zombie Got A Blog?

So one of my programming friends today noticed I mentioned something about my blog, and I got the question: “Zombie, you got a blog? What’s it about?”

The truth is, I’ve tried to start blogs in the past.  And they went nowhere.  I started a blog based on a modern fantasy setting based on Urban Arcana Campaign Setting (d20 Modern) in the past.  I’ve started a blog about writing.  I’ve even started programming blogs.  They went nowhere though.

You see, I made mistakes in my approach to the blog.  I didn’t really have a theme, and it wasn’t focused enough.  It also wasn’t a classroom, it was a gallery.

You see, IMHO a blog should be a place for me to learn, rather than just a place to put things of interest to me.  It should encourage me to explore new areas and document my learning experience.  And it should add value to the readers and to my own life.

So why have I started to blog again, and what changes my approach?  I realized I was doing it wrong.

John Sonmez over at SimpleProgrammer.com is someone I’ve watched in my career for years.  Like, literally.  He is a Pluralsight contributor, so I’ve watched a number of his training videos on various interesting technical topics.  He created over 50 courses in 2 years, and they were all high quality content.  He worked like a zombie on those.  Way to go John!

Recently, he’s shifted gears and has started offering career advice for programmers.  He wrote a book which I highly recommend, Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual. It’s a great read for anyone (not just programmers) at any point in their career, though it has a lot of programmer specific content too.  He also created a course on effective blogging. One of the suggestions he made was to decide early and up front what your blog was about.  In other words, identify the theme.  And keep it narrowly focused on that theme.

If your blog is too general, it drifts into the “this is what I ate for lunch today” type posts you see on social media sites.  It becomes a scattershot approach to information publication.  And people don’t really remember who you are and what your blog is about.

So Zombie, What Is This Blog About?

This blog is focused on two things: Microsoft .NET programming (which I’ve done for 15 years), and the AWS Cloud (which I’ve explored for the last 2 years).  I’ve been really impressed with how AWS has grown and the tools available for software development, and I wanted to learn AWS in greater depth and also present it in a way that highlighted that AWS is platform agnostic.  It doesn’t care what programming language you bring to the table, it will still work.  And besides that, I like Microsoft .NET, and like the direction that Microsoft is moving under Satya Nadella.

So a bigger question: why the “zombie theme”?  Because I want to have fun when I work.  I think people are more productive when they’re having fun.  They also learn easier.  It’s a central concept behind gamification. We as programmers work like zombies when we get “in the zone”, and can produce great quality work.  Plus zombies never go out of style.  Just look at the way they dress!

There may be a bit of Mary Poppins in this approach.  She was a hard working zombie (with a great voice). Having fun is like “a spoon full of sugar” for any task that you do and help you become “practically perfect in every way“.  And who doesn’t want that?