Learning in public
NOTE: This post was first published in my newsletter. Subscribe to receive my posts a week earlier, right to your inbox 🚀
When I started this newsletter, I stated that Learning in Public was one of the main reasons for doing so.
But, why?
And more important: Is it worth it?
When I was 15, I started my own personal blog. It was hosted on Blogger, and it was a collection of random, funny, and exciting stuff I stumbled upon. Nothing fancy. Yet, I loved two things:
First, that I enjoyed creating websites. Blogger had this ugly(?) XML-like language to tweak its blogs, but I felt mighty changing colors and sizes. 13 years later, here I am.
The second thing I loved (and right to the point of this newsletter, focus Adrià goddammit) was that I knew stuff because I had shared them. I was aware of things, and I remembered them because I took the time of writing them down and creating the post.
This feeling was powerful. Do you mean I get to do what I like while learning interesting stuff? Shut up and take my money (I was 15, so yeah, good luck taking all my money).
I’ve had several blogs afterward (Geeks.cat, which disappeared. And now my account on Medium). The idea, however, remained the same: forcing yourself to share is the best way to learn a topic. I’d go even further: the only way of getting to know something is by being able to explain it using simple words.
I have changed the format (now I started giving conference talks). The format is not important. A blog, a short talk, a video, a podcast, an answer to a forum, whatever. As long as you share, you improve.
The goal shouldn’t be “to reach as many people as possible”. That’s a quite lovely side effect. Yet, the goal should be to help your future self.
Start simple. You read cool stuff online? Share it on your team’s Slack, on Twitter. Curate a post list and publish it (it’s so damn easy).
The wheel never stops turning.
Then, you might see the benefit of explaining something. It could be a short blog post, a code snippet shared on Codesandbox, a cool design on Dribbble, a lightning talk in your company.
Once you started to do so, why not trying to submit a talk to some cool conference? I kept it simple the first time. I spoke at Barcelona Crafters, who wanted the conference to be a safe playground for new speakers. This week I gave a talk again at Modern Web Event, and next week at Commit. It’s just another way of sharing.
And this, folks, is the main reason behind this newsletter. It’s just another channel I wanted to explore. The more people I reach, the better — it might mean more feedback, so more learning! The goal is improving.
Go for it.
NOTE: This post was first published in my newsletter. Subscribe to receive my posts a week earlier, right to your inbox 🚀
