Hello everyone, I am Saurabh Mhatre, a blogger and front-end developer trying to make a mark in the software engineering industry. My journey in the technical blogging field started shortly after getting my first job as a software engineer.
Writing Journey on Medium
I had just graduated from college in 2015 and had started working as a software engineer in Reliance Jio. After a few months of researching and learning technologies for office level and personal projects, I wanted to document few learnings in form of technical articles.
At the start of October 2016, I started off by writing about interesting facts and the history of popular technologies like Github and Linux on Hashnode and Medium. The initial articles were mediocre and I received a fair share of constructive criticism along with positive feedback from the developer community.
A few of my articles from 2016:-
As you can see from the screenshot above one of the articles written on Reactnative got a decent amount of traction and since I was learning React.js and Reactnative at that time, I decided to focus on these two technologies more in upcoming articles. Focusing on the feedback and reflecting on it positively I eventually slowly started improving my article content, title and featured images. The headline analyzer by coschedule helped a lot in improving the structure of article titles.
Soon, the viewership and engagement on Medium started increasing and I became much more consistent in publishing articles as well. During this time, I used to post links of my medium articles on various Facebook groups related to technologies covered in the articles. The initial traffic was from Facebook which boosted the page rank on google search results. The increase in page rank of articles, in turn, increased the rank of my medium profile and WordPress blog at that time as well.
In the next month(Nov 2016), the articles on react and reactnative started performing decently. A lot of people were struggling with the Redux setup and its terminologies at that time(including me), so I wrote a beginner-level article for setting up Redux with react which received a decent amount of positive feedback.
With the increase in page rank of my articles, I decided to start my own publication on medium and initial readers of my articles started following it as well.
By December 2016, technical writers were receiving a lot of organic traffic and google also started ranking medium articles to the top of their search engine results. This led to almost triple the amount of viewership from the past month and some of the articles started crossing 15k views and 10k complete reads which was a medium's way of saying 10k people read the article end to end. For technical articles, I felt that it was a huge milestone because it's not easy to keep article viewers engaged till the very last word of a technical article.
Another reason for the increase in viewership at this time was my switch from generic technology-based articles to project tutorial based articles. If a viewer liked a project tutorial, there were high chances of the users to read the article multiple times for implementing the project later. There was an option introduced in the medium to highlight text. Many users used to highlight code snippet texts when copying the code which lead to highlight notifications in my notifications feed. This gave me a good indicator of how many people were implementing the project and also the satisfaction that my articles were helping people in their projects as well.
I wanted to take blogging even more seriously towards the start of the year 2017, so I wrote a lot of articles in January alone. And towards the end of the month, a magical thing happened:-
I was working on user authentication at that time and had documented the backend setup for the user authentication using Node.js and MySQL. Since there were very few articles written on the topic and google favoured medium articles at the time, the article reached the top of search results for the below search query:-
The increase in viewership went exponential and a single article received more than 100k views for the first time. It eventually crossed 196k at the time of writing this article. Also since the article was written in 2017 it is at the third rank for the same google search in 2021 when I am writing this article.
I was in the process of finishing the draft of the frontend setup for the same user authentication topic when all of this was happening. Looking back it seems like a huge thing, but I wasn't tracking viewership much at that time because the emphasis was more on writing regularly.
At the start of the next month, I released the frontend setup of user authentication in react. A lot of past readers and people from Facebook groups showed an amazing amount of feedback on the article. Getting lucky for the second time in a row even this article rose to the top of google search results which brought in an insane amount of traffic in a short span of time leading to more than 400k views:-
This remains one of my best-performing articles till now on medium.
At that time, a paywall was not introduced in medium and I had not monetised any of my articles in any manner. The viewership and drive to help people were enough to build this entire series of articles.
Since writing the article in 2017 using class-based syntax in react, a lot of things changed in react ecosystem and libraries used in the project for the article.
I eventually archived the original repository for the project, built a new one with react hooks and drafted a 2020 version of the same article.
My pace of writing articles reduced a lot after that since I had a lot of things to take care of on the professional and personal front.
However, I did get featured as a top writer in Technology section on medium in 2017 and got more than 2k followers as well:-
Switching to Hashnode
Since 2016, I used to cross-post a lot of my medium articles on Hashnode and my personal WordPress blog. The major contributions to Hashnode started when the core team announced Hashnode originals program. I enrolled on this writing Bootcamp and wrote my first Bootcamp article on higher-order components in react. Hashnode team had created a Trello board for all the enrolled writers and the process was quite systematic. This was also the time when I got my first payment as a technical writer from the Hashnode team at the start of 2019 almost after 3 years of starting off with technical writing.
At the same time, the core team was improving the article drafting section in Hashnode and once it got released the result was just so freaking amazing. I started preferring to use Hashnode editor for drafting articles rather than medium ones. It had tons of markdown options and the preview for the code section looked great. Once the feature to use custom domain-based blogs got released to Hashnode, I switched from my own Gatsby based blog and Medium to Hashnode as primary editor for drafting articles.
Starting a Youtube Channel
Although I had a Youtube channel since 2018, I started experimenting with video tutorials only towards the end of 2019. The major issue at that time was my room was on side of the main road which meant a constant amount of noise getting into video recordings from traffic and vehicle horns. Sometimes I used to mention this at the start of my Youtube recordings in videos.
Luckily I was working at a coworking space for a startup at this time which was open even on weekends.
So eventually I used to travel to the coworking space on weekends and record videos in the quiet office environment. My voice was pretty robotic in a few of the videos at the beginning which became better afterwards as I became more confident in my presentation skills.
Once the lockdowns started with the pandemic in April 2020, going to the office was no longer an option. Luckily Zoom team introduced a background noise suppression feature which greatly reduced the traffic and vehicle noise in later recordings for the Youtube channel.
At the time of writing this article the channel has crossed 10k views, however, it is not monetised yet since Youtube requires at least 1k subscribers and a specific amount of active watch time for monetisation options.
Mentorship opportunities and becoming a MERN stack mentor
In Jan 2016, my friends had conducted a full-stack development workshop for final year students in my own engineering college(R.A.I.T Nerul). I was part of the teaching group and conducted a session on react.js in front of students for the first time. I was actually the worst-rated teacher in my entire group of friends.
However, I took it positively as well and tried teaching final year engineering students in 2017 again at R.A.I.T. This time the group of students was smaller, I had ample amount of time for preparation since the teaching sessions were stretched for a span of 4 months. This greatly improved my teaching skills and confidence. Also, the juniors whom I was teaching at the time were quite supportive and luckily quite brilliant hard working as well.
In 2018, I received an opportunity to conduct a month-long workshop on frontend development at K.J.Somaiya Engg College(Vidyavihar) via a close friend. This time I was much better prepared and my teaching skills were decent now.
In 2019 via the same team, we conducted a front-end development workshop at K.C.College(Thane) which improved my teaching skills further.
In Nov 2020, I approached a local coding boot camp(BoardInfinity) and have been teaching MERN stack development to students for almost a year.
I received a star coach award from the bootcamp recently and still continue to improve my teaching skills.
Key takeaway points
Support system matters
None of these achievements would have been possible if I did not have a strong support system behind me. Working on technical writing, video tutorials and taking lectures always meant sacrificing a huge chunk of personal time spent with family and friends. Luckily my family is quite understanding and supportive in this regard and always motivates me to achieve more. At the same time, they always caution me not to go overboard beyond a certain level as well, because I do tend to go beyond healthy limits quite often. My friends and colleagues over all these years have been equally supportive and encouraging as well. So building a good support system of people who constantly help you along the way matters a lot.
Do it for helping others and personal learning, money would follow
I started off with my initial articles with the sole purpose of helping others and improving my personal skillset. Eventually paid writing and mentorship opportunities did happen. But if I would have jumped into this area for the sole purpose of earning money, I am pretty sure I would have given up in the first year itself. Even today, when someone is able to secure a job through any of my resources or guidance, that in itself solidifies my belief in creating and working more to help others.
Take feedback positively
In this entire journey of technical writing there would be very few but surely some negative comments, criticism or plain sarcastic views from people on social channels. The proportion in my case is around 5% of general feedback I receive on monthly basis. However, we tend to feel bad and focus more on this negative feedback rather than focusing on the rest of 95% of positive and encouraging feedback. There's a popular term in psychology called negativity bias which briefly states that things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. I have been personally been making sure that such feedback doesn't affect me negatively and I only try to see the scope of improvement from such feedback. An optimistic attitude and perseverance go a long way in building a personal brand and a successful blog.
Hope these takeaway points help you in your journey to grow as well.
This article was written as a response to a prompt from Hashnode Coding Bootcamp:-
Prompt: Share your path to becoming a writer/becoming interested in writing. What motivates/motivated you to become a writer
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