As an ambitious programmer, I will not be satisfied with the daily repetition of moving bricks and writing bugs. In order to make myself more “valuable”, I decided to do something very meaningful, and that was to write a technology blog. Because I think “share” is the most noble character of our program ape, because when I just entered this line, is also countless predecessors, through their words with blood technical articles, just let me take a lot of detours, less stepped on a lot of pits. And now it’s my turn to give back.

Do open source projects

At the beginning, it was also the most difficult time. I don’t know what to write because I don’t have anything in my stomach.

I started my tech blog around March 2018, when I was not busy at work, so I had free time to do things I was interested in, such as coding and blogging. Later, I gradually formed the habit of writing several technical blogs whenever I was free. At present, there are more than 70 technical blogs. Since they are all original, it takes me a long time to conceive and prepare each article.

At the beginning, I didn’t know what to write because I didn’t have anything in my stomach. I want to go before THINKING, since there is nothing to write, then I will not write at all! I don’t want to embarrass myself, because it’s a hobby in itself, and I don’t want to do it as a task.

Maybe you thought I’d just give up? No, no, no. You’re overthinking it. I’m not gonna give up that easily. I was thinking, if I don’t have the goods, the first thing I need to do is to have the goods. So the first thing I did was to sort out, sort out my years of work experience and insight, as well as the code I had been working on in my spare time.

At that time, I was quite keen on visiting Github, especially attracted by the superb technology and ingenious design ideas of those great gods on Github, so I set myself the direction of “open source” project at that time, and the goal was to make a project with more than 100 stars within a year.

I started working on XPage, my first open source project, during the day and after lunch, often until 1 or 2 am, sometimes more than 3 am, and then woke up at 8:30 the next day as usual. To be honest, I still admire my momentum at that time.

The figure below is the code submission statistics of my GitHub account. From the figure, it is obvious that the number of my code submission has increased exponentially since the first quarter of 2018. In the second quarter of 2018 it reached 416 submissions, which is an average of 4.6 submissions per day, which is pretty crazy to think about. After that, it basically kept between 150 and 200 every quarter, so that on average, it was submitted at least once a day.

Of course, just writing code is not enough, I still want more people to see what I write, especially open source projects, if no one to see or participate in, wouldn’t it be of no value…

As a result, I started looking for ways to bring my open source project to more people, and here are a few of them:

  • Play Android: www.wanandroid.com/, Hongyang Daishen, still in maintenance
  • CTOLib codebase: www.ctolib.com/, seems to be in maintenance
  • Android bus: www.apkbus.com/, it seems to be cold recently, I can’t get in…
  • Bubble on the Internet: www.jcodecraeer.com/, at present half dead, no one to maintain…
  • Dry goods concentration camp: gank. IO /, there is no one to maintain…
  • Developer headline: Toutiao. IO /, and no one is using it now

Judging from the current maintenance status of the Android technology sharing forum above, Android is definitely cooler than it was in 2015.

Finally, after three months of continuous efforts, I ushered in my first 100 star open source project: XPage, 9 months ahead of my expected goal! With this success, I became even more determined to do “open source projects”, and subsequently wrote many more open source projects.

Try blogging

After experiencing the initial crazy wan-code mode and crazy promotion mode, the next thing I need to consider is how to write a technology blog.

At the beginning, I didn’t have much writing experience, so THE content I wrote was mainly based on the promotion of my open source project. The main content was to directly move the readme of open source project, and then add the promotion link at the beginning and end.

After three months of writing like this, I found that although the articles were original and full of dry materials, I found that the page views of the articles were not very large, unless you were writing about well-known projects in the industry, such as Google DataBinding, Navigation, etc.

Later, I tried to write several source code analysis articles, and found that the amount of reading was even less. After that, I wrote several articles about experience, design patterns, etc., and found that not many people read them either.

Choose the right type of article

After doing this for a period of time, I gradually found that those articles with high reading volume are basically the following types of articles:

  • Headline articles. These are catchy headlines, often with exclamation marks and question marks.
Instant messaging with RabbitMQ is surprisingly easy! You don't even have to write back-end code? Please, stop asking me how TO teach myself Java! Come cleanCopy the code
  • Practical article. Teach you to complete a feature step by step.
Vue + Spring Boot Project Practice (I) : Project introduction, Detailed description of the complete development of FlutterCopy the code
  • Problem solving essay. Teach you how to solve a common development problem.
4 ways of JavaScript memory leakage and how to avoid Android to solve the vertical RecyclerView nested horizontal RecyclerView sliding conflictCopy the code
  • Tutorial articles. Teach you how to use a well-known project, tool, or library.
Chapter in the history of the most simple SpringCloud tutorial | end taught you how to use tencent's hot fix framework - TinkerCopy the code
  • Experience sharing articles. Share personal growth experience, interview experience, career experience, etc.
Work four years summary of database knowledge points program life | from the Internet addiction to Microsoft, BAT, byte offer harvester reverse attackCopy the code
  • New technology articles. Share the latest cutting-edge technology in the industry.
Android Studio 4.1 has released a 1.12 Adaptation tutorial for The Flutter updateCopy the code

Focus on writing skills

In addition to the type of article to choose, the content of the article is also very important, which requires us to pay attention to the writing skills:

  • The headline must be catchy.
  • The preface or abstract of the article must be able to arouse the reader’s interest.
  • Key places must be matched with good pictures (size had better be unified), pictures and texts can arouse readers’ interest.
  • Pay attention to the composition of the article, coherent to be clear.
  • At the beginning or end of the article, it is best to have recommended reading or related reading.

Focus on platform features

Sometimes, even if you have a good selection of articles, the content is good, but may be published for many days also little reading, why?

Sometimes, your reading of the same article on one platform is much lower than that on another platform. Why is this?

This is where the characteristics of the platform come in. To take a simple example, for the same technical article, you will read much more on Bilibili than on CSDN, and for the same technical teaching video, you will read much more on Bilibili than on CSDN. Obviously, Bilibili is a platform for videos, while Zhihu is a platform for q&A.

Here are a few features of common technology communication platforms:

  • CSDN

Established technology exchange platform, started as a technology blog, a large number of users, but the quality of mixed, blog content to solve problems, guide, basic technology based articles, is a good place for novice bloggers to practice.

  • The Denver nuggets

Nuggets is a new technology exchange platform, more popular in the technology rookie circle, because of the existence of the boiling point module, so it is reasonable to become a mecca for water. The number of users is small, the content of blog prefers new technology, and the overall quality of blog is high.

  • Jane’s book

Simple book, comprehensive creation, writing platform. Although it started as a non-tech blog, it was loved by everyone for its beautiful interface. The technical blog content is similar to CSDN, but the overall quality is higher. However, the platform once violated the rules and was invited to tea by the new office of the network, so now the review is very strict, and the author is not respected, and always put all the articles published before to the ban, resulting in many people have begun to abandon it.

  • zhihu

Zhihu, also known as “Bi Hu”, is a comprehensive communication platform with a high reputation. However, since it is a Q&A business, the technology blog is not widely read.

  • Think no

Sifu, also known as SegmentFault, is the Chinese version of StackOverflow. It is a technical question and answer platform with an overall tendency to the front end, and the number of users is about the same as excavation gold, but not very large.

In this way, I according to the above principles, began to constantly learning, constantly on the technological exchange platform output, finally have a little achievement, become the signing of CSDN blog expert, harvest in Denver and zhihu nearly 2 k fans, each big platform article reading every day adds up to nearly 1000 times or so, presumably.

To be honest, tech blogging is not an easy path to follow. It takes a lot of hard work and perseverance, or you can easily give up because of trivial things.

Operate wechat official accounts

After a period of technical blog success, I did not start to slack off. At that time, I found that those bloggers who had done well had already started to operate their own wechat official account, so I did not think about it, after filling in a pile of information on the official wechat official account application form, I began to try wechat official account.

As SOON as I started writing my first article, I was blindsided when I opened the article editor of my wechat official account: Before that, I used the Markdown editor to write my blog, and my wechat official account did not support this editor. Not only that, the editor of wechat official account has strict regulations on links in articles, and links to articles not on wechat official account will be invalid.

At the end of the day, these things can be overcome, but the most difficult one is traffic. Since the articles of wechat public account are not open, there is basically no reading volume in the initial stage of its creation. The second is that even if you have a little followers, but the click rate of wechat public number article push is very low, can reach 20% of the click rate is very good.

Although the wechat public account has many disadvantages and is very difficult to operate, it is very good to use it as a management and drainage platform for my open source project materials due to its automatic reply, custom menu, topic tag and other functions.

conclusion

  • The premise of writing a tech blog is that you have to have real knowledge, otherwise your writing will be misinformed. So the first priority is to improve their technical level.
  • It’s a good idea to know what you’re going to write about before you start a tech blog.
  • It’s important to pick the right type of tech blog, and pay attention to your writing skills.
  • Different communication platforms have different characteristics, suitable writing content and ways are also different. In the platform of choice, choosing the appropriate writing style and content is critical.
  • The operation of personal wechat public account is relatively difficult, but as an open source project information management and drainage platform is still very good.

Resource sharing

Here are some of the best tools and platforms I’ve used in the past two years.

Open source project hosting platform

  • github: github.com/
  • gitee: gitee.com/

Technical exchange platform

  • CSDN: blog.csdn.net/
  • The Denver nuggets: juejin. Cn
  • Think no: segmentfault.com/
  • Jane: www.jianshu.com/
  • Zhihu: www.zhihu.com/
  • Bilibilii: www.bilibili.com/
  • Wechat official account: mp.weixin.qq.com/

Tools url

  • Markdown article layout tool: www.mdnice.com/
  • Free map bed (upload pictures) : img.rruu.net/
  • Alibaba Vector icon library: www.iconfont.cn/
  • Wechat public account plug-in (Yiban. IO /) : yiban. IO /
  • Forage TWO-DIMENSIONAL code generation tool: CLI.im /
  • The online PS tool is www.uupoop.com/
  • Application distribution platform dandelion: www.pgyer.com/
  • MP4 to GIF (MAC) : github.com/mortenjust/…

Wechat official account

More information, welcome wechat search public number: “My Android open source journey”