Getting Back to Coding with Learning and Building in Public

Hello Friends 👋,

It has been so many moons since my last blog post and since I did coding. Life came in between, and I had to focus on that first for my mental health's sake. It's still lingering, but I'm in a much better state now 😊. So I'm slowly making my way back to coding and writing. And I need to hold myself accountable, together with you all! How would I do that?

Learning in Public

Learning in public is when we learn something and share what we've learned with others through content creation (blog posts, videos, etc.) or simply post them on social media like Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

I've been learning in public for a while. I wrote many blog posts about anything that I learned. They're not only technical concepts but also other experiences and things in the tech industry that interest me, like tech communities and open source.

Learning in public has been giving me many great lessons and benefits. And some of them are:

• It helps the future me. I often look back at my previous posts when I get stuck in something, knowing I've written a post about it.

• It motivates me to keep learning and sharing my knowledge with others. It helps me a lot in holding myself accountable.

• It gives me a chance to learn together with others and make friends. We can make mistakes or need to clarify whatever things we explain, and people would give us feedback. I learn and grow much more from the feedback. And from there, I get to know more developers and tech writers, and we become friends.

• The more I share, the more I learn how to communicate better. Now I'm able to explain complicated concepts in a more simple way that can be understood by beginners. I guess being a non-native English speaker has become one of my advantages. Because I usually can't understand something just by reading the docs in one go. I need to read it repeatedly, translate words I don't understand, read other blog posts, and sometimes watch tutorial videos. But through this process, I learned much more. And most of the time, that's when I can finally know how to explain things.

If you want to learn in public, I don't have any other advice than just starting it. Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes and experiences are great teachers in life. We can always learn from our mistakes to grow and be better.

I highly recommend this article, Learn In Public, by Swyx, to motivate you to learn in public.

Building in Public

Building in public is when we create an app, website, or anything else and share the progress with the public. It can be through blog posts, video content, or sharing on social media.

I never do building in public. And I have to admit, I have many unfinished projects 🥲.

The Month of Building in Public

I'm part of the Virtual Coffee community. And building in public is the theme of this month's challenge. And this challenge is open to everyone! You can read this article to participate. Although it fears me, I'm taking part in this challenge. So, let's do it together 💪🏽!

I need a portfolio website, and I want to learn NextJS. So I will start building it with NextJS and style it with Tailwind.

My Goal for the Monthly Challenge

I need to set achievable goals that I can accomplish at the end of the month. As my daughter will start her summer holiday next week and we will be on vacation for a few weeks, these goals must be realistic because I won't have time to code during the day. So here are my goals:

• Prepare the environment; install NextJS and Tailwind

• Create a navbar and a footer

• Create About Me and Contact Me pages

• Basic styling

I know it sounds like nothing, but this will be more than just a building in public for me. It will also be learning new things in public. If I can achieve these goals before the end of the month, then I will add more 🙂.

Final Words

Getting back to coding, learning, and writing after being away for so long takes work. It feels like I forget many things already 😂. But I'm ready to get back on track with the help of learning and building in public. So, who's with me? 🙌🏼

PS: You can follow my journey in my series on DEV 😄.

📸 Cover photo credit: Nik on Unsplash

Thank you for reading! Last, you can find me on Twitter, Mastodon and BlueSky