#CNC2021: Write More - MISSION 1

Introduction

Hello, Hello 👋 I am Khloe Brown. This is the second part of a series of posts for the CodeNewbie Challenge for 2021: Write More.

Mission Overview

The second mission of the #writemore challenge is called “Three Ideas”. Coders are challenged with creating 10 ideas for a blog, then narrowing down their list to 3 final ideas. The process of narrowing down the list should be backed up with explanations of what the blog would include and why they chose that blog as one of the final 3.

The Work

Create a List of 10 Ideas

It was suggested to do research at numerous sources of tech news, media and blogs to gather ideas of what to write. DEV Community, CodeNewbie Community, Twitter, Newsletters of professional and fellow coders and other sources where one would read and post their technical work were all encouraged to browse and explore. After a couple of hours, I was able to see what others are posting, what was most popular, what was new and what hasn’t been discussed before.

My list of 10 blog ideas is:

1. Organizing Your Sass Code
2. How I Built an Award Winning Website
3. My First Time Blogging
4. HTML Explained: The Series
5. CSS Explained: The Series
6. A Responsive Navbar in 3 Styles
7. Project Progress: Save the Bees!
8. Is College Worth It?
9. Getting a Job Through Bootcamps
10. 100DaysofCode / 7Projectsin7Days / 2Articles1Week Updates

Narrow Down Your List

The next step is to brainstorm your ideas further with notes and points to use. It’s important to write freely for this exercise. Overthinking will only block incoming ideas for the list. Even if the idea is silly, bad or unnecessary, it’s good to put it down to keep the streams of writing and brainstorming flowing together.

I narrowed down my list to 5 ideas that I felt strong I could write about. For each idea I wrote down some ideas of what I could talk about or do for that point. Full sentences aren’t necessary to get your ideas out as long as you wrote enough to understand when referring to later.

1. Project Progress: Save the Bees!
   • A website to inform users about the endangerment of bees. Explain why they’re important to the environment and people. Provide ways to help local honeybees. Include a mock eCommerce page to buy honey to donate to conservation. Should include a about the company page, about bees, beekeeping and the endangerment page, and a how to help page.
2. A Responsive Navbar in 3 Styles
   • A tutorial blog showing and explaining how to create different mobile-friendly navigation bars. Some should include logos, some should have hamburger menus, others should not have hamburger menus, some would be on the bottom of the viewport.
3. Organizing Your Sass Code
   • A tutorial blog explaining why messy code is bad and how to keep your Sass code organized no matter the size of the project. Explain many different ways to organize such as folder management, includes, mixins, useful comments and proper format.
4. HTML Explained: The Series
   • A explainer series over viewing HTML for new coders. Would go over the basics of setting up tags, explains attributes and elements, and goes over what different tags mean and where to use them.
5. Is College Worth It?
   • An explainer / personal blog discussing personal experience with college and what I got out of it. Discusses different roads to take for the same end goal of a good dev job. Open to comments and others’ stories. Provide data and research of those who did and didn't go to college, demographics of college students, and other data-driven examples to show who should and who shouldn't go to college based on facts. Include opinions based on experience too.

Narrow It Down Again!

The final step is to narrow down your list again to a final 3 blog ideas. This can be tough as some ideas are just as interesting and important to write about as others. After some time, I was able to finally narrow down my list to my top 3 favorite ideas to write about in a blog.

Each point has an explanation of why it made the cut. I also made sure to follow the extra rule of choosing each type of tech blog for my list - tutorial, explainer and project.

1. Project Progress: Save the Bees!
   • I chose this topic as my main “project” blog as it’s a project I have already started. To document all the challenges, changes and results of this project for a blog seems like a great idea. It allows me and other readers to view a project from the beginning in real time to its deployment online.
2. A Responsive Navbar in 3 Styles
   • I chose this topic as my main “tutorial” blog as it’s something I feel comfortable showing others how to do. There are many ways to make a navigation bar and responsiveness is very important in the web development field.
3. Is College Worth It?
   • I chose this topic as my main “explainer” blog as this is a subject I personally see discussed and questioned quite a lot. In today’s world, so much information is available at anyone's fingertips (often for free). I would like to discuss my personal experience going to college for web design, what I learned, what I didn’t learn and things I learned outside of schooling that all led me here today.

Summary

The work continues to be challenging but fun simultaneously. I enjoy how much research this challenge is allowing me to do. This exercise helped me learn to make better brainstorming drafts for upcoming blogs and articles.