I have been working on Android software development for more than two years since I graduated from university. I have also been blogging for two years. I rarely write about technology, but as it’s the end of the year, I’d like to share both my experience and what I’ve learned about blogging, or how TO learn.

A bumpy blog career

It’s interesting to keep blogging. Before the end of 2016, I hadn’t started blogging yet, but I was impressed by many articles promoting the benefits of blogging. It’s no secret that at the beginning of my blogging career, my main purpose was to be popular.

Compared and have a look, now trill artificial web celebrity, low cost for a graduate student, soon or writing code tech male especially, can think earn ratings by writing blog, this is an idea of how young, if I had to cross back to I say a word at that time, I really can not hesitate Dui myself:

Before you think about earning fans by blogging, think about how much hair you have left!

Of course, even back then, I knew blogging would be a hard road, but WHAT I didn’t expect was that blogging would be so damn hard!

1. It was a very sad start

At the end of 2016, when I first started blogging, I struggled to share what I had learned in a blog post, but to my dismay, it seemed that many of my predecessors had already written poorly.

But I do not believe evil, I still wrote a few articles, now look back at the original article, I have some can not bear to look at……

At that time, it took me about 3 to 4 hours to write an article, because I clearly remember that I started to write the article at about 2 o ‘clock in the afternoon on weekends. When I finished writing, it was already dark, and I just went to the noodle shop downstairs to buy a large hot and dry noodle.

— As you can imagine, when I was just a beginner, I wanted to be recognized by many people through the summary of my blog, so I paid more attention to every word and every knowledge point in the article. I would spend several hours on each article.

But at that time, the quality of my articles was really low, but I still clicked CSDN to see the number of clicks on my articles with great interest every day. Unfortunately, a week later, the number of clicks on my new articles was less than 100.

In this way, I persisted for several months, until more than half a year later (in the second half of 2017), my article hit a breakthrough of 10,000 hits, by then I had about 20 blog posts.

I wrote 20 blogs for more than half a year, and the accumulated page views exceeded 1W, which is really not a achievement worthy of congratulation (moreover, I always doubt how many of these page views are contributed by my own constantly refreshing……). . Even so, I was very excited at the time, and I still think it’s worth celebrating — for my hard work and persistence.

So far, if someone put my original post links to me pointing out my mistake, I will still feel shy for my immature words, but I’m not taboo – six months for the experience blogging experience let me get into the habit of the stick to write blog, whenever I comprehended somewhat in the study, I will try to through the blog to share and summary, And in the process of summing up again to consolidate their own knowledge system.

The accumulation of small knowledge was insignificant. At that time, it seemed to me that the popularity of blogging was a thing of the past. The idea that I should write a blog to summarize my recent learning began to take root in my mind, which was perhaps the power of habit.

2. Turning point — Positive feedback in the blogging process

In the second half of 2017, I began to learn the principles of some popular frameworks, thanks to the help from my friends in the company at that time. At the same time, I gradually felt the power of the open source community, including RxJava, Retrofit, Dagger and so on. Only then can we stand on the shoulders of giants.

During this half year, I began to learn a lot of the open source community’s tripartite libraries and their principles, such as Dagger, Retrofit, RxJava, UnitTest, DataBinding, etc. (JessYan’s MVPArms code provides a lot of help for learning and using some of the libraries). I tried to sum up my blog, and in some ways the open source community has been my best teacher – I remember reading an article where someone claimed to have graduated from an open Source community college and I felt the same way.

I began to summarize these knowledge into a blog to share. To my surprise, I began to receive more or less recognition from some friends, which made me more motivated to continue learning and output.

Gradually, I began to try to contribute to the public account of the blogs I am satisfied with personally, such as these two blogs about Dagger:

  • Dagger2 use in detail (four) Scope annotation and source analysis

  • Dagger2: Dagger to Android

We satisfied two articles contribute to the Guo Lin WeChat public number greatly, the result is, of course, is not included, but I can always Guo Lin big reply soon and guidance – sad always inevitable, but Guo Lin big encouragement and affirmation to me in the reply, also let me realize their own deficiencies, and see yourself, continue to work hard.

After the two submissions are unfortunately failed, I began to try and learn some knowledge of the deeper, during the second half of 2017, I studied a series of tripartite library source code, I was understanding of the blog, focused more on summary – I start to write blog, often through my past so forget the knowledge can always in the first place in my back.

For example, I always forget about Android gradients and Retrofit, but I know I’ve summarized two of these blogs, and it’s easy for me to retrieve them — line by line, after all.

At the same time, I was beginning to receive some encouragement from other friends, which was a pleasant surprise to me, and both of these benefits began to form an important component of the positive feedback loop of the blogging experience. In other words, I did start to enjoy blogging summaries.

3. Snowball?

The timeline jumps to the beginning of 2018, when MY blog already has around 6K page views — it’s strange that it took me more than half a year to get to 1k page views, but it increased by 5k page views in less than six months.

At the beginning of the year, I began to encourage myself to apply to become a blogger expert at CSDN by the end of 2018.

Please don’t judge me for being so utilitarian at that time, because I really wanted to get such a recognition, at least at the time I thought it was quite a distant idea, because one of the requirements of applying for blogging expert at that time was more than 10W page views.

I am very happy that some of my articles have been recognized by more people, including two articles I contributed to Linda Guo, which were successfully shared with everyone through Linda Guo’s official account. I was thrilled, to tell you the truth, because it meant that the pioneers recognized their successors; Later, I came into contact with Ren Yugang by chance. Thanks to his recognition, my article was also shared on yugang Talk’s official account (In the past six months, He really helped me a lot and was very tolerant to me, thank you).

Technical articles to share, can let me the most simple directly and the domestic each big ideological communication and discussion, it is difficult to implement in real work, in the process of the progress of learning, I know the more excellent developers and technology bloggers, they also division also friends to me, from the article, I learned the more things I don’t have access to.

Interestingly, at the beginning of this year, I thought the idea was very far away. Within 5 months, I was officially recognized by CSDN and became one of the blog experts. At that time, I did not expect that such an easy application was approved.

4. Thinking and practice of blog

In the two years of blogging, I’ve been thinking about the following question:

What is the nature of blogging?

Learn, interrogate, reflect carefully, distinguish clearly and practice earnestly. — I like to use this phrase to describe my understanding of blogging. In today’s explosion of knowledge output, knowledge acquisition is no longer a problem for developers. The challenge is how to effectively filter and filter out high-quality articles for learning.

I started looking for examples, such as the classic RxJava tutorial and HenCoder series of Throw Line, the classic unit test series of Zou Xiaochuang, and briblue, a blogger on CSDN whom I admire very much, and so on….

It’s safe to say that I consider these articles to be standard knowledge articles in the industry. They don’t focus entirely on “how to use apis” or “chunks of source code parsing” — instead, most of these articles focus more on a systematic explanation of a specific topic. Maybe I still don’t know how to apply it in the project, but as I have systematically mastered its principles and ideas, these problems are no longer insurmountable gaps.

Yes, I think the transmission of ideas is more important, so I started experimenting with that in my own writing and wrote a series of blogs like this:

  • To create the best Chinese blog series for Android Jetpack

In terms of time cost, I spent more money on each article above. Taking the article “Android official Architecture Component ViewModel: From past life to Origin” as an example, I spent at least 10 hours on the way to delete, delete and modify, and finally achieved the effect I was satisfied with, that is:

Lifecycle, LiveData, or DataBinding as much as possible. Try to explain the nature of the ViewModel — the principles and ideas of maintaining state — as clearly as possible.

I believe this is by far the best ViewModel blog post on the web, and I hope I can continue to do so. In a way, this behavior is time-consuming, but it does make me more obsessed with every detail of knowledge — until I fully understand it, I can be sure of the entire knowledge system through the text summed up.

In the process, trying to will also bring kinds of income, this is my practice, but it does not necessarily is right, because in essence, it seems to learn from blogs, conclude and summarize the main idea of more and more far, indeed, but I more enjoy in the every article fondle admiringly feeling to myself, On the one hand, it does enhance my sense of gain and loss (i.e., face), but on the other hand, it does strengthen my self-discipline.

I don’t know the summary of what I said

In a way, my blogging experience has been my learning experience. Blogging is really a boring process, but it is also a very enjoyable process. I have to admit that the continuous output of blogging does give me higher ratings in interviews, but frankly, who hasn’t written a blog, there are many more skilled people than me.

But I’m more satisfied blogging this behavior in a habit of change: I can more quickly search and find my lost knowledge, blogs, equal to systematically review again, and more good communication with counterparts in the thought, these things are language to describe it’s hard to overstate, the benefits of the but again feel really unspeakable.

Time flies, the past so, review the course of two years, words but a few thousand, the article will end, but I do not know what to say. Thank you for reading, whether you laugh or gain.

You bring a smile, I’m lucky to get.

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About me

If you think this article is valuable to you, welcome to ❤️, and also welcome to follow my blog or Github.

If you feel that the article is not enough, please also urge me to write a better article by paying attention to it — in case I make progress one day?