But Why Should You Write Content? A Counter Intuitive Approach to my own notion to Content Creation in the previous article.

But Why Should You Write Content? A Counter Intuitive Approach to my own notion to Content Creation in the previous article.

In this post I will state out a few perks of actually writing the content. If you have read my previous article how social media depletes our focus and ability to fall into the zone Deep Work (once again read this book by Cal Newport) , You will know that It really seems to be hard to create content on multiple channels of social media taking in account their respective make-you-distracted feed algorithms and other features.

Considering all this and yet moving forward , There are some major pros to Content creation that I did not basically discuss in my previous post. I did narrate my story little bit , much unclear thoughts was put out and the whole focus was towards increasing focus.

So let us now once again go back to my initial days , But this time from a different perspective , Last time it was as a learner or Amateur , But now as a Professional Software Engineer? What is the difference here? 8 months into learning my perception as a great learner is slowly shifting towards the image of being an Software Engineer already!

But as a complete newbie to this zone , I am alienated from knowing how am I supposed to reach the point where my perception becomes a reality and I get to work as Software Engineer. This is when I started researching beyond code or principles , I started looking into Engineers who widely appreciated Networking or generally connecting with better fellow Engineer and that is how I found LinkedIn. LinkedIn as platform marks a starting point to make my perception as an aspiring SWE/SDE to a real one. All this with just some dedicated learning from YouTube and self-paced internet sources , YES all for free.

Coming back to LinkedIn , A year rewind from now and you will notice a dull profile with a typical wannabe Engineer header and no cover or profile picture. Oh yes , It was me stepping into LinkedIn , Knowing nothing about this platform. My whole brain had kept up a picture “LinkedIn = Job” , Little did I know what I was stepping into a year ago. Months into LinkedIn stalking various Top Notch Engineer profiles and getting hit by FOMO with a truck , I realized something. To thrive I need to different from the average! I still had no plan how to execute this thought , I just knew. That is when I started randomly spamming Engineers and Recruiters from FAANG , Yes I thought that’s how things worked. A good friend of mine advised me to keep the first 500 connections strictly towards my interest and surprisingly it worked , By the time I had hit my first mark of 500 connections , My feed was full of interesting Software professionals.

So I thought I was doing everything right until weeks in , I had no impact like as though I did not exist in this platform. Even I was spam connecting , In reality I was not cold mailing anyone or getting things done. I assumed it was all going good but hey it’s my first , I learnt this pretty soon and started connecting with new Software people , People who are not just working professionals but actual geeks who I noticed regularly posted some articles or posts elaborating things that were extremely. At this point of LinkedIn I did not have stupid Influencer posts cluttering my feed too , It was beautiful. For the next month I started observing the pattern , By now stalking 100’s of profiles I had set myself a decent profile. Started posting some motivating articles , nothing specific or technical.

But I reassess my content from time to time , Even though I thought there was a significant improvement from nothing to an account with basic motivation and 500 people long network was cool , I definitely knew it was not enough to make my perception a reality or attract hiring folks. By now I had got deep into Networking and LinkedIn in general , I was learning in the morning , Learning to network at midnight , Reading books from Dale Carenage Hahaha!

After tweaking with my content and stalking other people for some weeks constantly I realized something , Most people on LinkedIn had a consumer mindset! What does this mean? Well most people wanted to learn new things apart from just wanting to have a job or opportunity, Just like how I was learning from others , other people also wanted to learn from some others too , The chain goes on. And this is when I realized that it’s time to stop posting cliché writeups on motivating people and simply get deep into explaining technical content , Learning the core and explaining it within few paragraphs to the general public.

My strategy was simple :

content : New topic = Things I dont know;

filter : MyContentIdea = core || interal || basic;

Consistent= true;

do{
post(content ,filter);
}while consistent;        

By now it had been months into exploring LinkedIn , And honestly I want to tell some important change in my brain’s image about the platform :

• Easily the best platform to find your niche of people
• Ton of opportunity if you are skilled and can show it to the public
• Helps you get an idea or general view about how corporates work , how organizations work from a very personalized perspective from experienced employees
• You get to read debates of wise people who throw argument that are gem of an information
• The least cluttered social media IMO
• The best platform to meet new people who are genuinely enthusiastic about career , have some plan or simply wish to grow. Most people are optimistic

Coming back to our journey , I think after setting up my mind to drop content I started right away without much thoughts , concurrently I was still spamming people to grow my network to 1000 which was major milestone. But hey something about this spamming! It did not continue after the 1000 mark because honestly my focus shifted towards building genuine audience from my content (which worked we are now a network of 3000 people).

Now Initially it used to be project which I built regularly to learn React or something , which I explained because I did not know how to pick topics , Now I wanted to formulate some kind of algorithm in my brain to generate topics for content. Oh yes I finally taught my brain the simple algorithm for finding content.

When experts debate , comment and post things and you read jargons you dont understand , That will be your next content. (Here experts is anybody who shows deep interest towards providing value from content or having significant experience in the domain)

Some JS expert argued in some post , “that is because of closures the execution context....” , This was completely unknown to me at that point , So my next content would definitely be internals of JS. Why this manner of choosing content? I was learning ‘Theoretically’ a lot of things , And helping other learn difficult concepts which I found easy to learn.

This still goes on and is my favorite way to generate topics for my content , But months into writing deep content , Sharing great write-ups and receiving positive response from people , My perception slowly started to take action , I could feel myself turning this into a reality , With all this attention I started getting some InMail's , I was excited. My content was creating new opportunities for me.

One interesting story would be how I got into Unicode , my PM Nawaf texted me for the first asking me directly about being part of the Web Team , This was the fastest interview process , My content had reached out to them as appealing. They shot an interview over google meet and hired me instantly. I am grateful considering what I have heard about the broken Tech interviews.

Also my OCD kicked in and wanted to create an organized space for content. That is why I literally set up a notion page for my content , Writing and scheduling content there. By the time we fast forward 2 months ahead, I had my content calendar filled with topics , Writing content regularly , Posting new types articles all week , I had generated attention of 2000 people which was a super great deal for me , This made me joyous and kept me motivated to keep pushing for better content. (Posting a picture of content colander)

All along the way creating content on what I learn and love to do has been win-win for me , Even though as discussed in the previous article where I had spread out the cons , the process of creation has it's downs but content on its own has always been a plus for me.

Now as I conclude this article , I have lost the consistency which I keep preaching about due to how hectic life has been past week juggling between work and personal life. But finally I have got myself together. I will start the flow going with new interesting topics on core Software Engineering and Programming in the JavaScript eco-system.