You know how sometimes you look at those monthly horoscopes, hoping for some cosmic clue about what’s coming your way? Like, “Virgo, expect a career breakthrough!” or “Love is on the horizon!” Yeah, I used to glance at those. But let me tell you, my September 2021 had its own damn forecast, and it was entirely self-made. No stars involved, just a whole lot of elbow grease and a head full of tangled wires, both literal and metaphorical.
I got this idea, see. I’d been messing around with personal projects for ages – little scripts, some simple web stuff, trying to figure out how things worked. And I’d always just kept notes to myself, scribbled down on whatever was handy. But then it hit me: why not actually share this stuff? Not in some fancy, polished way, but just the raw bits, the messed-up parts, the “oh god, why isn’t this working” moments, along with the “aha!” ones. That’s where the “love” part comes in, I guess. It was a genuine drive to put my practical records out there.
So, the first thing I did was just open a text file. Seriously. I typed out a rough outline of what I wanted to talk about. Not topics, just the kind of stuff. “How I broke X and then fixed it.” “My stupid mistake with Y.” “Building Z from scratch, the hard way.” I sketched out what a simple blog site would look like. Nothing fancy, no big frameworks, just static HTML and CSS because I wanted to understand every single piece. This was my personal coding boot camp, but for sharing.
Next up, I had to actually build the darn thing. I fired up my code editor, and just started banging out HTML. I mean, I really typed it out. No templates at first, just `
` tags and `
` tags. I wanted to feel every character. I picked a super basic color scheme, something that wouldn’t distract. Then came the CSS. Positioning stuff, making text readable. It felt like playing with digital Lego blocks, constantly moving things around, seeing what broke and what miraculously worked. I remember spending a whole evening trying to center a `div`. A `div`, man! It was infuriating, but when it finally clicked, oh, the satisfaction. That was the tiny spark that kept me going.
Then came the content, the actual sharing. This was where the “career” part, or at least the work part, truly kicked in. It wasn’t enough to know something; I had to articulate it. And not like I was writing a textbook. I wanted it to sound like I was just talking to a buddy over a beer. So, I started writing down my past projects, thinking about the exact steps I took. I tried to remember the exact frustration I felt. You know, “I thought X would work, but it blew up in my face. Here’s why.”
- I started with a simple project: setting up a local web server from scratch.
- Then documented my attempts at getting a small database working with it.
- Moved on to trying to automate some daily tasks with a Python script.
- Each step, each error, each workaround, I wrote it down.
It was a grueling process. My full-time job took up most of the day, and then I’d come home, eat something quick, and immediately dive into writing. My evenings were gone. Weekends became a blur of coding and documenting. There were nights I stared at a blank screen for an hour, just dreading typing the first sentence. Other nights, I’d get lost in a technical rabbit hole, trying to re-verify some obscure detail for an old project I was writing about, and suddenly it was 2 AM.
I remember one specific Friday night. I was trying to deploy this simple static blog to a cheap hosting service. Thought it would be easy. Nope. FTP issues, permissions errors, the whole nine yards. I must have tried five different ways, each one failing, each one giving me a cryptic error message. I was ready to throw my laptop out the window. My wife came in, saw me hunched over, practically yelling at the screen. She just brought me a cup of tea and told me to walk away for a bit. I did, cleared my head, came back, and found a tiny typo in my config file. A single character! Fixed it, and boom, it deployed. That feeling of relief, that small victory, was addictive.
The biggest challenge wasn’t even the tech. It was the self-doubt. “Is this useful? Is anyone going to read this? Am I just wasting my time?” You put yourself out there, and it feels vulnerable. But then, a few weeks later, I got a comment on one of my posts. Just a simple “Hey, this really helped me fix a similar issue, thanks!” Man, that was it. That one comment changed everything. It transformed “wasting my time” into “actually helping someone.”
And that’s where the “love” and “career” really merged for me. It stopped being just about personal projects or a job. It became about sharing, connecting, and continuously learning. This whole journey of documenting and sharing my practical records? It unexpectedly sharpened my own skills. Explaining things clearly made me understand them better. Troubleshooting for others helped me troubleshoot my own work faster. It wasn’t about a specific job title anymore; it was about building something, sharing knowledge, and finding a deeper satisfaction in the daily grind.
