I wanted to change things up a little this week and talk about personal growth. Over the years, everything that I have learned has been either for my current work projects or to gain skills that would be useful for my career. I touched on this in my very first post, talking about how I learned to love technical writing and how I developed the mindset necessary. Because of this, I rarely did things for my personal growth.

When I started writing my first post, I knew that I was embarking into unfamiliar waters. I have very rarely written about myself, and even then I would have to do only a few sentences or a paragraph for a bio. I wanted that first post to be special: a combination of telling a story of my journey, passing knowledge I have gained to others, and a showcase of my writing skills. I didn’t realize just how differently I would approach the task compared to writing documentation or blog posts for Kali.

Any time that you write, you know that you will need to proofread, edit, and evaluate. Depending on what you’re writing about, and who you’re writing for, you may need to devote more time to the process than others. I expected my blog posts to be somewhere on the quicker side of things. I had the idea and I started writing; after the second paragraph, I realized I was wrong. I stopped writing and read what I wrote, and decided I needed to start again. I wasn’t writing about what I wanted to and was inadvertently writing a guide. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I think that there are plenty of people who could use a good in-depth guide on how to start contributing to OSS. I even plan to write about it myself in the future, but this wasn’t the time to. So I started again.

This time I was wary of going off vision. I wrote what I thought was a solid first draft, and the core idea I had was visible within. When I started reading it, I found plenty of places that I wasn’t happy with. I didn’t go into enough detail about myself, or didn’t portray what I felt was the key to good technical writing. I didn’t need to start again, but I did need to start doing rewrites of sections. After quite a few hours, I had something I was happy with and now felt it was in a good enough state to get feedback. I shared it with others and got really good feedback, worked on it, and eventually ended up with what I posted.

The entire time I was going through this process, I kept thinking about the irony of writing about my experience learning to love technical writing meanwhile I am learning to do an entirely different type of writing. A lot of skills do translate between writing. Sentence structure, word choices, topic flow, etc. It wasn’t like I was starting from scratch, as I did when I originally was learning technical writing. However, it was creating new skills and pulling at my creativity. I was really happy when I posted the final product.

Often people say that we should do things for ourselves. Improve our lives and take care of our mental health. Of course, it’s a struggle to always do so. Work gets in the way, health, weather, and plenty of other stuff. You do what you can, but it is always good to find something new that is simple enough to do but brings you that same feeling. Writing for this blog has been that for me. It took something that I enjoy, transformed the skills into a learning opportunity, and gave me a product that I can feel proud of that is entirely for my own personal growth.

It has gotten easier since that first post to write in this format, and I know it will get even easier as time goes on. I am really looking forward to what I put out months from now and seeing the growth. If you have the time, try doing something similar. Just pick something to do all for yourself and see what comes of it. Whether that’s writing about something or programming something, just make sure it is something personal to you. A month ago I would not have realized just how beneficial it is, and I hope you have that same experience.