In an attempt to get better at photography, this year I started photo.cate.blog and shared a photo a day to it (the total was 366… so I guess I shared one extra but I’m not sure when). I also shared these photos on Instagram. I wasn’t a huge fan of Instagram at first and was irritated when it spammed all my Facebook “friends”, but 1) I’ve found a number of raccoons (and otters!) to follow on there and 2) a lot of my friends use it, and it’s nice to see their happy moments.
Depending on the day I tended to either:
Take a photo of something in the moment – even on a relatively boring day.
Choose a recent photo and edit it.
Pick a picture relatively randomly and force myself to make it interesting. I got creative with filters, cropping etc.
None of the photos are selfies (well – except for two of my feet). Much as I love the selfie as a genre, this wasn’t a project to collect a bunch of photos of myself, but rather a project to collect a years worth of glimpses of the world as I see it.
It’s been nice to build up a library of processed photos, and edit things more than I would when just capturing a snapshot on Twitter. I think it’s made me better at both taking photos and editing them – I learned that I take basically every image 0.6 degrees off, for example. It also gave me a reason to use the WordPress apps every day. We’ve been working hard on making the media experience better, and I’ve seen my experience get better as the time has passed.
Last year I took a month off blogging. I live by the schedule, but sometimes it seems oppressive. I don’t want to break it arbitrarily, but if I’m so busy living by the schedule how do I understand what it does for me, and what should change?
Last year I didn’t get the desired effects. I just worked a lot, and watched the West Wing. Or maybe I just didn’t get the desired effects at the time. In retrospect, I think it not working was something of a kick to find other things that did. To carve out more time for my own projects.
So this year, I’m going to try again. With slightly different reasons and ideas of success.
I want to balance inputs and outputs. Writing is an output. I want this time to read more. Articles. Books. Whatever. Lately I feel like these are out of whack. I write more than I read. I review more than I code. On a slightly more practical level, I don’t think I really responded to personal email through the entirety of February.
There are only so many hours in the day, and effectiveness only goes so far. I’m freeing up some hours to read. And maybe write more… code.
I’ve been blogging 3x a week for ~2 years now. It’s been really good for me. I really believe in a schedule, I think it’s made me a better writer, and kept me on track.
However for a while now I’ve been contemplating… taking a break. I didn’t want to do it for the wrong reasons – such as a knee-jerk reaction to a busy week – that would set a precedent. I think you can take a deliberate break from your habits, but I don’t want to just give up something that has meant this much to me, for this long, on a whim.
Having disconnected for a bit in May, and having this project to Choose Cate – myself over imaginary obligations – I’ve realised that June is the right time. This is in fact the last action of Choose Me May although I hope I will continue prioritising myself.
I still plan to write – just in other forms, or write stuff I won’t publish until July. I plan to keep up my weekly review posts.
What am I hoping to get from this?
Recharged creativity.
Perspective from stepping back.
Extra focus time for Big Projects.
It seems really self-indulgent to announce on my blog that I’m taking a month off blogging. But actually that’s not what it’s about – it’s about coming back in July.
I always give the same advice when people ask me about starting a blog. I say: put together a month’s worth of content first.
As far as I know, no-one who has asked me this has actually started a blog, so maybe it’s bad advice. Or, maybe it’s good advice, because if you can’t put together a month of content with no audience, you’ll probably to struggle to put together a month of content with a website and no audience.
This is why I think Medium is cool, for the person without their own platform, because it helps you find that audience, especially if you’ve already built one on Twitter.
But still, I think you need a little backlog first. Because when nobody reads your first post – and after years of writing, it often feels like nobody is reading the things that I write – you will be discouraged, and that’s not a great frame of mind to be creative in. Knowing, “well, this is the thing that is coming next, and it’s written so I may as well” is how you put out the next one.
Have a Schedule
The best thing I have done for my writing, is to give myself a schedule. A schedule of days to post on was great, a schedule of days to post on and topics was even better. It gives me a structure, and it helps keep me in balance, so I don’t get obsessed with one topic and write about it incessantly.
I think you can evolve this over time with the things it turns out you want to write about, no point dreading Thursdays every week because it’s topic-you-hate-day. I think it can change over time, my Mondays used to be travel-and-personal, and as I’ve been travelling less lately, I’ve started to expand what personal means.
For me, the schedule is purely for me. So I only write about it in the context of “this is how I get stuff done”, and not “and on Wednesdays you can expect this kind of post”. If people notice, fine, but mostly they don’t. It doesn’t matter – the schedule is for me.
Write For It’s Own Sake
A lot of the time, it feels like nobody reads what I write. I look at my traffic stats, I know it’s not just my mom, but still. Sometimes I get an email (wow!) and sometimes people tweet me nice things, and occasionally something I write gets a lot of discussion online but mostly… I just put stuff out into the void.
Sometimes that is discouraging. But I get enough out of writing – becoming a better writer, structuring my thoughts, reflecting on things in this way – that even if nobody reads something I write, that doesn’t mean it’s not without value. Even if one person reads it and hates it enough to attack me personally, it’s not without value.
Write because there are things you want to document, not because of anything external. My weekly roundups are purely for me. No-one else needs to read them for them to be worthwhile (but it’s lovely when they do! Especially when they send birthday presents as a result).
Dark Sharing is a Thing
There are certain posts I’ve written where I thought yes, people are going to read this. And then… nothing. Maybe I get a couple of tweets but it feels like… DOA (dead on arrival). But then, the traffic stats show that people are reading it, and I look at traffic sources, and it’s coming via email, or Facebook. And people are reading it, and sharing it… just not publicly.
Things I Still Don’t Know
Self Promotion
Recently I started sharing posts that I’d written, ones that were proving popular or that I felt strongly about… more than once. This was a huge step, and one that made me extremely uncomfortable. I had this temporary thing where I’d re-share things I’d written from a while ago on weekdays that I don’t publish (Tuesday and Thursday). This soon fell by the wayside.
I don’t know if I should be doing more with what I write or make, or making more with “connect with me on social networks” or if I should just keep on being “yeah this is me over here, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing”.
Multiple Platforms
The first post I ever put on Medium, ended up on Lifehacker. Obviously I wasn’t going to replicate that success and so I had this complete blank as to what I should use Medium for, and how would I follow that? It was super intimidating. Eventually I got over it and posted something else, but I still don’t really know what to put on there.
Now, I have a HuffPost blogger account. I have no idea what to do with that either.
Sometimes I see people/platforms asking for submissions of content. I pretty much never (once this year, no response, didn’t follow up) submit anything.
Anything Regarding Monetization
I had this idea that it might be interesting goal for this year to see if I could cover my hosting and domain registration costs. Maybe I’ll gather enough data to write a separate post about this, but the short story so far is: utter fail.
I technically work on Ads now, so I installed the WordPress Plugin as an experiment to see what happens. I liked the way it laid things out for me, although I preferred the cleaner aesthetics without. So far (~4 months), 13.41GBP. Meh, probably not worthwhile and I’ll likely turn them off later.
For ages I’ve used Amazon Affiliate links, I figured I would link there anyway so I may as well. From time to time I get a giftcard which I use to offset my expensive kindle habit. So far this year: 22.85 USD.
I hear the thing to do is ebooks, and I have a couple of ideas but feel pretty ambivalent about it. I don’t find the project of publishing an ebook interesting in and of itself. Stressful, yes, how would I decide what to put in it?
What Will Be Popular
Some of my most popular posts are ones where I thought “it’s only me who needs this remedial advice, I’ll just put it somewhere where I can find it if I need it again” (like this one). Or, my solo-travel post, the original was just this stream of consciousness of things I felt had taken me too long to figure out (and I was lucky enough to get edited). Sometimes I’m just arranging a bunch of data (as with my popular women in tech posts here, here and here).
Meanwhile I have other things that I thought might be popular, but weren’t. Oh well, as I covered above: try not to care, keep writing.
I’m Cate, I work for Google as a Software Engineer (on mobile Gmail). For fun, I’m a qualified ski instructor and I love to kickbox. I was the Instigator of Awesome at Awesome Ottawa, and I do various things around getting more women into CompSci.
I have a BSc from the University of Edinburgh and some portion of a Masters from the University of Ottawa. I’ve taught programming and developed programming curricula in the UK, US, China and Canada. I was also in IBM’s Extreme Blue program. Coming out this year, I have an academic paper, an educational paper, and an industrial paper.
Credit: xkcd
I got hired by Google because I studied really hard and rocked my interviews. It may be different if you come in not as a new grad, but for me my “personal brand” was negligible in getting the job. Stuff that I’d worked on and written about was a conversation starter for two interviewers (one each round) but that was really the extent of it.
Where it made a difference, is after I started. Perhaps because I’m very open about my research and my interests on my blog, I was connected with someone working on an amazing project when I was training in Mountain View, and my first week in Canada it was suggested I move to that project (which I will do at the end of the month). I also connected with someone at Google whose blog I follow (Jenny Blake – she writes Life After College and has a book of the same name coming out – Amazon) which was great, I just pinged her on Twitter and we had coffee. I think because I’ve been writing about women in tech and posting talks that I give etc on my website, that made it easier for me to get involved in outreach stuff.
And, setting up a team-mate on a date via Twitter certainly piqued the interest of my colleagues! So far it’s going well, although I have no plans to set up an online dating service in my 20% time.
Credit: xkcd
I don’t really like the term “personal branding” – for me, I’m really just myself, only on the internet – which allows me to scale in terms of the volume of interactions. I gave a talk to less than 20 people, but it got posted on Geek Feminism which really increased the reach and that was amazing. Being from the UK and having travelled about a bit, Twitter and my blog help me create, build and maintain more remote relationships.
So, I said that my “personal brand” didn’t help me get the job, although to be fair it has resulted in people pinging me with interview offers, which I haven’t taken up. Actually, I think that depends how you look at it. Does the number of results you get when you search for me help? No. But here’s what did:
Blogging has been tremendously helpful for improving my writing and general communication skills. The guys who started Stack Overflow (Joel on Software/Joel Spolsky and Coding Horror/Jeff Atwood) really think that in order to be a good software engineer you have to be a good writer and I have really come to see their point.
Writing something also serves to improve my own understanding of it. I wrote up interesting pieces of assignments when I was at school, now I try and write up the books I read.
I doubt I would have put myself forward for the Holiday Science Lecture at UO if I hadn’t been blogging, which improved my public speaking no end. Thoughts turn into blog posts which turn into talks, and putting all the talks I give on my blog improves the talk itself (more time thinking about it, feedback), and increases it’s reach.
Doing interesting things makes it easier to have interesting conversations with people. My blog and Twitter have resulted in a number of great experiences. and, having moved to a new city the ease of Twitter for connecting with new people has been really helpful.
Twitter and my RSS reader makes me better informed – I have not found another medium through which I can get such diverse and timely information.
Some advice for getting started on the “virtual” you
Start
Credit: xkcd
This can seem like the hardest part – and I know because I’m trying to start my internal blog right now and I’m completely overwhelmed by what to write. One think I suggest to people thinking of starting up a blog is to try and write 4-8 things and schedule them – that’s your first month’s content.
Keep going
Credit: xkcd
At first Twitter seems like talking to yourself in public. A blog is worse, because the form is longer! I was getting enough out of it that it was worth writing for myself, but now I have a good amount of subscribers and get comments on about half of my posts. I think the thing is to give yourself a realistic schedule and stick to it. I often schedule blog posts in advance, and at the moment I aim for about two posts a week. I also started using Twitter, and eventually had things to say that required more than 140 characters – that’s when I started blogging.
It’s a conversation
Credit: xkcd
I confess – I am a terrible lurker when it comes to blogs. I love Google reader because it’s so fast and I consume massive amounts of content through it – but I don’t click through enough to comment. When it comes to your blog, no-one knows how much you interact with other people’s, but on Twitter the people who are only in it for self-promotion are really, really obvious.
I actually schedule some of my Twitter feed because I tend to consume large amounts of information in one go and I don’t want it to go out all at once and drown people’s streams. For me, Twitter is 95% trying to share stuff that’s interesting and/or informative, and if someone has a question or something worth commenting on, I’ll respond to it. The other 5% is sharing my own blogposts and asking questions myself.
Don’t dismiss other forms
Credit: xkcd
I pinged Jon Skeet – fellow Googler, C# Evil Genius, and #1 on Stack Overflow to ask him about how he built his personal brand. In large part he’s used forums and question answering sites like Stack Overflow (which did help him get a book deal, as well as a job at Google). For me, blog and Twitter has worked to build my presence and share what I’m interested in, but depending what you’re interested in it’s not necessarily the best format.
Be human
Credit: xkcd
I think we all have those “friends” on Facebook who are constantly posting long angsty moans about their life. It’s a primary reason why I rarely use Facebook. People write long angsty blog posts as well, and on Twitter some people I know (and like) in person share such detail about their life that I’ve actually started to dislike them. I’m going to say what everyone says – don’t share too much, don’t expect other people to be interested in every minute detail of your life. But, don’t be a robot – be a human. I balance the stuff I share with bits of my day that I hope are amusing, often stuff that my teammates say to me, for example on my tea consumption, “is there any blood left in your anti-oxidant stream?”, or after starting two small toaster fires that I’m measuring success in a commits to fires ratio. It’s the same on my blog – I write about failing, because I learn so much from it. And there’s a balance, because I don’t want to come across as some kind of fembot, but nor do I want to moan. But sharing my human failures, for example when I dropped out of grad school, revealed so much warmth and such great advice from my audience.
Don’t wait for someone to say, “It’s time for you to have a blog. You have something to say” – I mean, I can tell you that right now, but really you have to convince yourself and believe that you can write something worth sharing, first.
I think this applies to everything. Don’t wait for people to tell you what you get to do, go out and make things happen. (And read What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, which is where this advice comes from)
2. Fail.
Credit: xkcd
You will write things that no-one will comment on. You may even write things that no-one reads. It’s demoralizing. What I did, was that I got enough out of writing for me that kept me going when no-one was reading, and it was a shock when people started commenting, and emailing me, and sharing what I’d written on Twitter.
Stop caring that no-one will read what you have to say and write it anyway. Write something stupid, and learn to make a better argument next time. Stop worrying about failing and go ahead and fail – it’s not as bad as you imagine, I promise. Sometimes you’ll surprise yourself and succeed, and always you can learn something.
Again, this applies to any number of things. One of the things I love about working at Google is that we embrace failure as a learning experience. We set impossible goals, and fail to reach them – but that’s OK because “Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary” (see this post by Don Dodge). I like that, I am always setting myself impossible goals, I don’t think I know how not to do that. And so, I’m always failing. But what that means is that I’m always learning, and making progress little by little on my impossible goals.
3. Don’t Expect to Learn Everything in School.
Credit: xkcd
Unfortunately, most professors aren’t on Twitter and don’t blog. They may not get what you’re doing and they are probably not going to grade you on it. You have to figure it out, mostly by yourself. Find yourself a network of interesting people on Twitter, and find yourself some interesting blogs to read. Interact with the people you find.
Software development moves fast. At the moment, I code mostly in Javascript and do some CSS – neither of these are things I learned in school. To stay current in our field, we have to keep learning and investing time in personal development. You probably won’t learn how to write a great blog in school. But you also probably won’t learn a fraction of what you need to be a great software engineer, either. The best thing you can learn, is how to keep learning, and teaching yourself, and finding resources that help you progress.
Unfriending on Facebook – in which I answer some of the questions that send me significant amounts of traffic. “Unfriending on Facebook” is a popular search term for finding my blog.
What Makes a Programmer Great? – my friend Dig and I writing about what we’ve learned about being better programmers (or software engineers). Summary – be confident in school (especially if you’re a girl), then be humble and go learn as much as you can from people who are further along the path to greatness.
Round 2 @ Google – writing up my experience from my second round of interviews, and the process in general.
I think search traffic is really skewing these. Hilariously – 2,526 vistors found me via Google. 25 via Yahoo, and 21 via Bing.
Last week, I wrote that things have been a little bonkers lately. I have not spent seven days straight in Ottawa since the start of August and I’m stressed, discombobulated, and overwhelmed.
Normally, I figure things about by writing about them. Lots of work on? How can I be more organized/better at delegating/manage my time most effectively? Screwed something up? How can I do better next time? Working something out? What can I share as I go?
However, lately there’s been a number of things on my mind that I can’t write about – either because I’m not ready, or I don’t want to share someone else’s business, or because my writing about the situation would make something difficult and stressful worse. So the other day, Sacha and I had a long mentoring chat – which was great. I opened up about a bunch of things that had been bothering me and she was really helpful.
Something that we both touched on, though, was in these situations, you want to share what you’re learning but for whatever reason it’s hard. Sacha doesn’t publish everything she writes, but I don’t journal – I write to share. This is good because it motivates me to find a way to tell the story in such a way that I can share it, but in some situations that’s not possible – what then?
Perhaps we can share some high level observations, and the story – retell that later, when it’s less close to home. Here are some things I’ve been learning.
People will think what they want to think. If someone has made up their mind, it’s hard to change it. I’ve been in a situation lately where someone has made up their mind that I’m the bad guy and in doing so they’ve almost proved themselves right. I’ve been working very hard to be reasonable and not to react, but their determination that I must be against them means that anything I do – or don’t do – is inserted in the picture of “evil Cate”. I don’t understand why someone would live like that – it’s exhausting.
Don’t beat yourself up for your priorities at the time. I was stressing that I wasn’t living by my values – being truly “outside the box” (Leadership and Self-Deception, The Anatomy of Peace – both Amazon). Sacha asked me what more I could have done to make the situation better, and obviously some things sprang to mind – there’s always more you can do to make any situation better. However we talked about my priorities at the time where me doing something would have been helpful and I had more important things going on than this person’s drama. My priorities then have influenced this outcome – I can’t change that, and wouldn’t want to.
Other people have no concept of what your priorities are, or what your schedule looks like. One of my friends had been part of the situation and I was a little upset because I felt that he was buying into this person’s perception of me and my actions. Once we had a chance to talk and I had started explaining the separation between my actions as a facilitator and my personal views and he also realized just how much I’d had going on the last couple of months, his attitude changed and things are better between us now.
I’ve not been to the chiropractor since I got back from the UK because she will tell me I should come in 3 times a week and I just can’t do that when I’m flitting about so much! Meanwhile, Goodlife forced me to buy 60 training sessions and promised to sell any I had over because the assumption was that like other people I was exaggerating about how much I was flitting about. In fact, it ended up being an underestimate because new things came up and so I’m calling that promise in!
You can say “I haven’t spent seven straight days at home for the last two months”, but unless someone has/does live like that they have no clue what that means in terms of living. For me, going to the chiropractor is useful, but it’s not my number 1 priority. And when number 1 priority stuff isn’t happening, stuff that isn’t a number 1 priority sure isn’t.
Make a plan. Sacha quickly picked up on the fact that a big part of what was stressing me was the uncertainty. If X is happening, OK – I’ll take care of that. If Y – sure, I can work with that. Not knowing, though, is way more difficult.
So much of what we stress about doesn’t really matter. In the big picture, it doesn’t really matter if your sheets clash with your wall for a couple of weeks. A thesis is a big project – a couple of days in the midst of rushing probably won’t make a big difference. It’s sad that some friendships end, but hardly the end of the world. It’s horrible to be discussed behind your back, but the people who know who you really are won’t buy the stuff that isn’t true for more than a moment, if that. People disagree – and mostly we manage to rub along anyway.
And the final, biggest thing I’m realizing – you always think there is more time, until there is not. Are you living by your values, investing in the relationships that matter and living your lifetoday? Because eventually, everything ends and everyone leaves. And the things we did not do… we better hope and work so that they are not the truly important things, that we never got around to making room for in our lives.
I keep reading people who’ve quit their job in order to make a living as a blogger. There’s all this stuff about minimalist life, and freedom from routine.
Is routine so bad? Is stuff so bad? I like to live in different places, but I like to live there. And I like having stuff. If you own less than 100 items, what about skis?
I have no desire to start my own business.
I’m starting to think that’s weird.
The blogosphere is great, but lately it seems like there’s a consensus that working for a company is bad. Perhaps it’s just a change from grad school, but working for the right company is awesome. There’s access to resources and expertise that I wouldn’t have otherwise. There’s diversity of opinion that’s really helpful. There’s constraints that require creativity to work around – yesterday that led me to more deeply consider my solution.
I’m excited to go into work today. Not about the 25 minute drive, so much, although that’s good time to reflect. But to arrive, and work on my Most Important Task – collaborating to try and create something awesome.
I have this fear: when I graduate I will have nothing to blog about. But reading about Forrester’s move lately has left me pondering a different question – what if taking a great job, meant ending my blog.
I don’t think I would – would you?
Forrester is (slightly) different because it’s to do with IP, but could that kind of move extend towards a software engineer? I.e. when I spend an evening writing about usability, or software products, that should be the IP of the company I work for during the day?
I don’t think it should be. I hope that I will get a job at a company that embraces openness, and social media. That realizes that Twitter is a valuable resource for information, and not a time sink. I don’t think, if it came to it, I could stop blogging. I have this hankering to share, to document, to comment.
When I was applying for university, some students who had planned gap years and applied to Oxbridge were asked if they would give up their gap year to secure their place. This was a question that those who had planned gap years were told to prepare for – and caused some soul searching.
It’s a different form of the same question, I guess, how much do you want something – and how much will you give up in order to get it?
I can think of some things I really want. But nothing I’d give up my blog for. How about you?
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