Teaching is my way of learning

Exactly one year ago today, I wrote my very first blog post. It’s been such a long journey ever since, so it’s time to draw a line and review all my technical writing accomplishments.

I realized that sharing knowledge is a way of pushing myself to reason thoroughly on a particular subject. So, both my readers and I have something to learn from my writing. Finding time to think of future blog topics, researching particular subjects, writing code snippets and the ever-present pre-publishing reviews is worth the hassle.

Under the umbrella

The Internet is huge, so being heard is not something you would leave to chance. From the start, I knew that I needed to do more than writing high-quality articles. When nobody knows anything about you, your only chance is strategic marketing.

Several well-received articles, and Allen Coin proposed me for the Dev of the Week column.

Meeting true Java heroes

This journey allowed me to meet so many great people I would never have had the chance of knowing otherwise.

Lukas Eder (jOOQ founder) was one the first people to find my articles interesting. After two months of blogging, he proposed me for the 100 High-Quality Java Developers’ Blogs list. With his great jOOQ framework and clever marketing skills, Lukas managed to build a large audience on various networking channels (blog, Reddit, Twitter, Google+). Without him promoting my posts, it would have been much more difficult to create so many connections with other software enthusiasts.

Eugen Paraschiv (owner of Baeldung) is definitely the person we should all look up to. Romanian IT industry has developed considerably, but I always felt we fall short on great software figures. Well, his passion for software craftsmanship is a secret ingredient for becoming successful in our industry. He’s been listing my articles in many of his personal weekly reviews, allowing my posts to reach his very impressive follower’s network. I’ve been applying many of his wise marketing advice and I can assure you they work like magic.

Petri Kainulainen (blogger and Spring Data book author) has been a great influence throughout my technical writing apprenticeship. I am a big fan of his articles and I’m fascinated by his ever improving concerns. Without him retweeting my articles, I wouldn’t have got to almost 300 Twitter followers.

While I first decided joining Twitter for article sharing, I soon discovered a great network of passionate developers. In less than a year I managed to get 286 followers:

Open-source contribution

From the very beginning, I created a GitHub account to host blog posts code samples. On one project of ours, I realized we were missing a connection pooling monitoring tool, so I decided to write my own open-source framework.

That’s how FlexyPool was born and from real-estate platforms to banking industry (US and Swiss), from GitHub traffic statistics, I can tell that some major companies have added connection pooling improvements tickets back-linking FlexyPool.

Towards becoming a professional trainer

Throughout my software development career, I kept on seeing all sorts of ORM and Data Access anti-patterns. That’s why I decided to create my own open-source Hibernate Master Class training material.

I started answering Hibernate StackOverflow questions since May 2014. StackOverflow allows you to see what users are struggling with, so you can better sense what’s more important to address in your training material.

Time for statistics

In my first year, I managed to write 70 posts which have been visited 88k times (on average 1250 views per article):

DZone published 65 articles that have been viewed 388k times (on average 6000 views per article):

Top viewers by country

My top five articles

Conclusion

Thank you for reading my blog. Without my readers, I would be writing in vain. Thanks for helping me throughout my first year of technical writing.

For the next year, I plan on finishing Hibernate Master Class.

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