Writing 30 posts in 30 days review

Rob encouraged me to participate in the ’30 posts in 30 days’ challenge this November. I got mixed feedback on the previous posts in the past days, the feedback on twitter was really good, but I also got a bit negative feedback. A few people told me that they skip the complete blog series, other told me that the series didn’t meet their expected high level.

I had to take a day of and think about the series and if it fulfills my personal expected level. Today I first wanted to write a longer post about the quality and the things that readers and writers can expect in this series but Rob was an hour faster than me.

I can only agree on what Rob wrote. The main goal is to write more frequently (to share knowledge, meet new people, improve language skills) and to get comfortable with writing. Writing blog posts is harder than most people think of and also consumes a lot of time. I’m happy with my existing posts, except the “why internet sucks” article where I fucked up the links. I always like to get constructive feedback, but it hits me really hard when people tell me that they stop following without a justification.

Robert tweeted today about my posts:

#FF @BastelsBlog and @kylog have written some of my favorite #vDM30in30 posts!

— Rob Nelson (@rnelson0) 13. November 2015

which brings me to the actual reason why I started this particular blog post: Feedback is really really important. If you want to do a good job you need constant feedback and not only once in a while (called feedback loops, for your bullshit bingo). Feedback always triggers a retrospective. You think about the work you did, the stuff that went great, the stuff that sucked but but needed to be done and is now finally done. You will keep the parts from the feedback loop that were good in mind to repeat them, the points with constructive criticism will also stay in mind because you automatically want to improve them in the next cycle. Feedback always adds another point of view onto a topic. Sometimes I you didn’t like your work but outsiders really love it. You will notice that the work isn’t actually that bad, you just suck at self-assessment (underestimation is okay). On the other hand you sometimes really like your creation but the feedback is bad. Why? Because you probably lost focus and really created cool stuff, but not for the requirements (“Hey I built a ship”, “thx but we asked for a plane”).

Positive feedback keeps you motivated, always try to slice your project into small pieces that you can handle in one day, try to get feedback from anywhere before you end your day. This will make you happy, because you can easily measure how good your work is and how you need/can improve it.

In that sense: let me know your opinion about the series in general; do you like the topics? What do you think about the post qualitiy?