Until last week, I had only one blog post on the Data School blog site. It was, obviously, not so many. I truly agree that writing blog about what we have leant helps us a lot to understand it even better and to improve our writing skill – yet long writing was not a quite good friend of mine (people who know how many months I spent to get my Master thesis done would definitely agree on that). Often I knew what I wanted to write about, however it was difficult to actually start the first line and I overthink a lot that everything should look good. Surely I know, I want to change that. And this is my blog journey dairy this week.
Monday
This week starts with a RegEx class from Peter. I really enjoyed it, writing matching expression was fun! So I start to write a blog about RegEx output method in Alteryx. I had to read some extra material to have a clearer structure about the content. Afterwards I get it done quite quickly because (1) I understood topic pretty well and (2) Peter gave us several example I could use to demonstrate different outputs. I was satisfied that I wrote something that day.
Tuesday
The day afterward, when we finished the Spatial class with Andy, he gave us topics to write about as homework. I thought in my mind, oh but I already wrote one yesterday. I quickly picked the one I found really interesting, that is to manually add new shape into the Mark Card “Shape” in Tableau. I actually already did that in my application, so I wrote everything again real quick.
Also today I posted a blog post in German on the blog. I wrote it quite a while ago, and it was a painful experience. I decided to write in German since I wanted to improve this language at the first place, not expecting it took so many hours to get it done. And I was dependent on somebody else to read and correct it for me.
“Oh, writing blog is not that hard!”, I thought, and I got a crazy idea that night to write a post every day this week.
Wednesday
And a day after I already regretted it. We had another long Tableau day working with containers. During the class I already had in mind which could be my topic. We ended the class at 16 and had to build for the rest of the working day a Dashboard. The weather was so nice (you know there are rarely sunny days in Hamburg) and I spent most of the time this week in front of my computer, so I decided to take a long break first and ride my bike around Hamburg to get to know it more. After I came back home and had dinner, it was already late. I got both my Dashboard and blogpost done at midnight. I was about to give up, but then instead I wrote it on Convo telling my colleagues that I am doing a Blog Marathon. Now everyone knows about it, tomorrow I need to write something.
Thursday
Today was a really tense day learning set actions and applying them in different sheets and dashboards. I also picked a topic and made notes during classes so that I could write about it faster later. Again we had a Dashboard homework, but it’s deadline is in ten days, so I wrote a post giving a tutorial how to build a drill down bar chart using set actions. At this point the whole writing thing got too much for me. But hey, only one more day to go.
Friday
On Fridays we always have a project. With Frederik and Mary-Leena we’ve got an amazing and fun time working together. I was happy about the teamwork and our final result, so it was not a big deal telling about it on the post afterward.
What I have learnt
Challenge done! I am proud of myself and definitely deserve a great relaxing weekend.
But no, I am still here writing this on Sunday after my midday brunch. Because I want to share my journey with you and also some tips to start writing for people who have difficulties with it, like me. What I learnt from this challenge is:
- Don’t overthink how it should look like. The hard part is actully to get the first line written down. Just do it. Write anything down. You can read and change it afterwards.
- As a beginner I would choose to write something I like or understand well. Because the writing part is hard now, the content part should not be a headache as well. After a while when your writing process gets faster and better you can pick other harder topics. It is also a great way to learn because when you write about something you don’t know that well, you need to read about it first and then understand it even more.
- Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. I might make a lot of spelling mistakes, but if I wait until the day I can write English or German perfectly, it would took forever.
- Choose a topic during class and take note will make you construct things faster when you write.
- Ask for help if needed. Some of your colleagues might be happy to read and correct it before you post.
And after all, writing is not that scary for me anymore.