Mission 1: Three Ideas
Goal
Develop and validate the three blog ideas for this challenge.
Homework
Come up with 10 blog ideas, then narrow those down to 3.
This challenge had a lot of great supporting material to help people get into the mindset of what it would take to create a technical code blog post.
Research:
- Search Twitter for hashtags related to areas of interest.
- Search blogs that talk about areas of interest. Medium, Dev.to, FreeCodeCamp, Hackernoon, Codeburst, basecs, Mozilla Hacks, etc.
- Look at Newsletters like JavaScript Weekly and RubyWeekly
- Think about things I am actively working on and wish there were posts that answered my concerns.
Brainstorm:
Aim for ten ideas. Here's the list I came up with:
- Examining Accessibility and Inclusive Design (this is my personal touchstone topic, as if I really want to make a transition to writing code, I want to do it in a way that can help me advocate for Accessibility and Inclusive Design better) - Explainer for concepts, tutorial or project for specifics
- Walking through Developer Tools that emphasize Accessibility - Explainer
- Making a Skeleton Resource for Coding (my biggest problem is getting started, so my overall goal is to make something that will help me do that. I figured I could explain along the way as I make it). Project, possibly tutorial
- Writing shell scripts using TDD and BDD principles (using shunit2) - Tutorial, Project
- Quick Fixes for Big Headaches (the shell can be your friend) - Project
- Deploying your own little CI Pipeline (Deploying Jenkins on your local machine) - Tutorial, Project
- Containers for the curious (Deploying Docker on your local machine) - Tutorial, Project
- Blending Angular, Protractor and Jasmine into a testing framework - Tutorial, Explainer, Project
- Road Rash: Cautionary Coding tales while the wounds are still healing (I did something, I got stuck, it hurt but I figured a way out of it) - Explainer
- How Would You Automate This (an actual Series I’m Currently Working On) - Explainer
Narrow it down to 5:
Many of the ideas I came up with are not so many ones I would want to eliminate as they are either peripheral to or prerequisite of what I'd want to write about. By taking my original list and grouping them, I came up with the following more condensed list:
- Examining Accessibility and Inclusive Design, Walking through Developer Tools that emphasize Accessibility - Explainer for concepts, tutorial or project for specifics
- Making a Skeleton Resource for Coding, Writing shell scripts using TDD and BDD principles, Example shell fixes to demonstrate the project - Project
- Deploying your own little CI Pipeline (Deploying Jenkins on your local machine), Containers for the curious (Deploying Docker on your local machine), Blending Angular, Protractor, and Jasmine into a testing framework - Tutorial, Explainer, Project
- Road Rash: Cautionary Coding tales while the wounds are still healing (I did something, I got stuck, it hurt but I figured a way out of it) - Explainer
- How Would You Automate This (an actual Series I’m Currently Working On) - Explainer
One of the reasons I ordered this list this way is that I couldn't figure out how to put Road Rash into another location other than as a sidebar, and it felt the weakest of my choices. How Would You Automate This I deliberately put at the bottom as I'm already writing the series. I want to emphasize posts and areas that I'm not already doing or that would actually be new territory for me.
Validate your ideas
I received some great feedback and interest from several people who reviewed my list and who expressed interest in seeing certain topics get covered. That had a lot to do with my grouping and decisions on which topics I would want to focus on.
Pick your top three
The top three and the working titles for each:
- Making Your Pages and Apps Accessible Using Inclusive Design Principles
- Skeleton Keys - A Project for Getting Started in bash, Python, and Ruby
- A Testing Framework From the Ground Up - Jenkins, Docker, Angular, Protractor, Jasmine
Turn In Your Homework
Turned in to the CNC2018 Facebook group, but also this blog post :).
Bonus Reading
Here are some additional blog posts to check out:
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