Start teaching and sharing awesome content
It’s important we continue to create, teach and share awesome content.
I gave a talk at React Advanced London on this very subject. One of my biggest fears of anyone attending a conference is leaving at the end of the day having not shared anything.
As the tools and technologies we use in our day to day lives grow, it's important we continue to create and share content. It doesn’t matter how junior or experienced we are in a subject, we can’t remember everything, so it’s important we have an intuitive way to find and discover the content we need.
Conferences are a great resource for discussing new ideas and hearing from the community their experiences of particular tools and technologies. If we all leave a conference and share something, we’ll be able to further that conferences impact by reaching those who weren’t able to attend.
What kind of content should I create?
It can be absolutely anything. It could be a single or series of videos on YouTube. It could be a tutorial or guide on Dev.to showing you end to end how to use a specific library or framework. You could go even further to share your experience running your own company or side project on Indie Hackers.
Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular platform to teach content, and this is being done with short videos or “hot tips”. Wes Bos prefixes his tweets with an emoji to indicate a hot tip. These tweets are often short and very informative, making them extremely popular to consume when on the go.
I like to think of these tweets an invitations to explore more. They make me happy when I first read but I always want to dive in deep and learn more.
A few years ago I was looking for a way to configure React, Redux, React Router and Redux Thunk, but I wasn't able to find any kind of article that was aimed at someone (me) who knew very little about either.
Once I spent several days fighting with configuration, I set about to write that article I was looking for. I tried to put the article together showing you through every single step involved, without leaving much to assumption.
Who should be creating and sharing awesome content?
You. No matter your trade or skill level, we should all feel empowered to create and share content on what it is we love using. Someone else will benefit from your insight.
Creating and sharing content also applies to brands too. If you're someone like GraphCMS who provides an API, Twitter, Medium, YouTube and may other platforms are great to showcase the beauty and ease of use when it comes to interacting with said APIs.
Brands could also have videos showing their users how to get the most out of their platform or a drip campaign that walks me through creating a working example using their APIs.
Where can we share awesome content?
There are many ways of creating and sharing awesome content, but a few of my personal favourites for sharing technical and non-technical content would be via any of these platforms;
- DEV.to
- Open source on GitHub
- Live stream
- Your own website or blog
Why create and share awesome content?
It's the right thing to do. In order for our industry to continue to thrive, we can all learn from each other. We will all explore and discover interesting things differently with tools and frameworks, so it's important we share this to make it better for us all.
Michael Jackson recently said that roughly 95% of the work in open source is around education, docs, pull request reviews, talks, examples, etc.
Taking part in of any of that are great ways to contribute, and it feels good to do it too.
When should we start creating and sharing content?
Now. Start doing this today!
It can feel intimidating to get started but don't worry, we're all here to learn and you might just learn a thing or two in the process of creating content.
Don't forget to continue to share your experiences, somebody else will benefit from it.