One year of blog

Dual-language

You might have noticed that all my blog posts have a "translations" field listing one other language. And there's also a button to change languages on the navigation bar. That's because my blog is available in both English and Brazilian Portuguese. To make this possible I translated the interface to Portuguese and, more importantly, write each and every post in both English and Portuguese.

The interface was really easy to translate, but needing to write each post effectively twice is a lot of extra work. So why do I do it?

When I was thinking about creating the blog, I faced a dilemma: in which language should I write in?

On one hand, writing in English would make my content widely available, since it is the de facto language of the internet. It would make it possible for example to share a post with a community I contributed to.

On the other hand, I like my mother language. And I'd want to be able to share my posts with people I know personally without an artificial barrier: when both me and the person are more familiar with Portuguese, it seems nonsensical to transmit the information in English. I also didn't want to alienate people, from my own country, which don't speak English (even though that is becoming ever rarer).

So I decided to go with both 🙂. Double the work, but none of the downsides and double the upsides. Actually it's not double the work, since the second post is mostly a translation of the other one rather than a completely new post. The fact that I don't post that often (once per month) also helps.

Open diary format

Another thing is the way I approach my posts, and my motivation. Or the answer to the question: There are a gazillion blogs out there already, why would anyone read mine? Is it really worth it to have a blog?

And my answer to that is: Yes it is, because I'm not writing for others.

The main reason I write on my blog is because I want to record the projects I did and stuff I found interesting, so that in the future I can look back to those. So it's basically a diary (although monthly).

But of course if anyone is interested in any subject they're free to check the posts, which makes this more of an open diary. That's very cool if it happens, but I don't count on it. I write for myself, but if others like it that's a very nice bonus 🙂.

This is why I don't tend to do tutorials, and instead document my experience through learning or building something. It has a much more personal take, even though it isn't as easily approachable by others.

(After writing down these two principles I do realize that they're a bit contradictory, but what can I say, it's how I feel. I am human after all 😛.)

Since I was treating my blog as a diary it made sense to me to try and write with a fixed frequency. I ended up deciding on once a month since that was enough to keep a certain momentum while not as much as to make me stressed over it.

I also ended up making the 20th of the month be my target date. This is only a guideline. I don't force myself to do any of this. If I don't feel like posting this month or can't make it to the 20th, that's okay. But by creating this optional deadline there's a healthy pressure to make me win over any laziness and think if there was anything interesting recently that I want to share (with my future self and with others).

This has worked really well so far. I feel like I've always had something interesting to share, and I did post every single month so far, missing just a couple times the 20th (this one included 😝). By limiting myself to one post a month I also manage to create a backlog of potential posts, even though there's usually something left to do on each of them before they can be posted (I have at least three like this at the moment).