Is it too late to start blogging?

I've read blogs, consumed podcasts and read articles on the web industry since 2010. Now I decided that I wanna take part in all of it.

I don't think it is really too late. It took me rather long to get here, because I ultimately always thought that I had nothing of value to share. And as the community iterated and evolved, what was being shared was often not what I could relate to. I was concerned with other things - things that I decided were not interesting for the broader community.

Plus, and I am sure that I am not the only one observing this, as a person grows in their profession / in their craft, what they deem helpful and valuable changes in relation too. What was once useful to me has long since become part of me. In that way I forgot entirely, that not only is the industry specializing more and more but there are people entering to face challenges that I faced long ago. And I might be able to be of a little bit of help here. Plus, when I taught Beginner Courses in HTML & CSS at SAE Vienna I realized how powerful it can be to reintroduce yourself to the basal elements that make up the platform of your craft.

Now that I've talked a lot about the why, I'd also like to take some time to talk about what I had planned to put on here. I've only recently started tweeting rather frequently. It's all just opinions. But I mostly only put those out there as a marker. Often what I wanted to express is done in a few tweets but more than often it feels like I wasn't able to convey what I wanted to convey. This is where I do crave some long form writing.

In Addition to more fully formed opinions I also intend to use the blog as a documentation of code-patterns, as well as specific solutions to specific problems that I encounter while I work. I also do this for myself - I would like to be able to revisit the learnings and my thought processes. But it might also be helpful to other people!

When it comes to design, I truly to believe that the pixels don't matter, so I won't be making tutorials or dos & don'ts. Design is pretty much covered in my opinions part. In a way my writing is intended not to serve as a portfolio as well. I've come to understand that portfolios don't show much besides pretty images. As designers it is beyond trivial to make something pretty. These are not the challenges that we face and this is also not where we work. If a portfolio is intended to demonstrate how someone works then it cannot be a portfolio of pretty pictures. Instead I am gonna probably put on some case studies of previous projects - a Format where I hope to better be able to convey what actually goes on.

When I was 12, I spent one entire summer just writing. Poems and short and long-form stories. My head was always filled with processes of world-building. German was always my favorite subject and writing essays was one of the few homeworks I actually did do. Nowadays when I am unleashed on a comment section, a chat or just a <textarea> I will go wild. No, not to misunderstand - I am not a keyboard hero, but rarely take the time to compress my thoughts, when it comes to text.

Editing of text is definitely a weakness of mine. Some students shiver at the thought of structured writing of essays I love it. The blog goes live with barely anything out of the ordinary - dare I say it goes live without some features that you might expect. But developing all of what I want and what I have planned for the blog (or for helloyes.dev in general that is) would have required me probably a month (or more) of time to work on it. So in the spirit of small, sustainable steps I instead decided to get things out as they are done, instead of waiting for an ominous "everything is done"-feeling. The blog is intended to evolve and grow over time.

Some of the planned features are:

• RSS-Feed
• Web-Mention Integration
• Varying Post-Types (comments, reposts, replies, etc.)
• code-highlighting

I'm excited! I am curious to see where all of this will go. If you find an issue, I would really appreciated it if you took the time to let me know. Thank you for reading!