Journey from a Software Developer to an Author

Stating with a punch line, an inspiration to all – Each one of us is born as author. But you never realized until you express yourself in writing J

It’s a blog about my journey from a software developer to how I became an author over the time. First off, I still work as a software developer and I consider myself as an enthusiastic part time author. This did not happen over the night, it took several years. I spend most of my time in reading latest ongoing developments in software industry; do spend time in writing articles targeting beginners to advanced level.

Here’s how it got started. After graduation, when I first started working with .NET Technology, I was in-fact new to .NET but had some understanding in developing web applications etc. As you all know where to find solutions or help when you get stuck with problems. Yes, I started googling and landed up in finding articles in CodeProject. For those of you not aware of what CodeProject is, its world’s largest number one technical community of over 10 million peoples who share or express their ideas, thoughts in terms of articles, tips, blogs etc. It’s completely free and open for all. At first, I registered myself and started following up with the latest articles. As I gained some knowledge, I made up my mind to publish an article related to .NET Technology. I was very excited to see my own articles with lots of comments from peoples all over the world, which helped me in understanding the readers’ expectations etc.  Enough about me, now let us focus on some other aspect that you might want to know.

Writing a technical article is not an easy task. First you need to really have a good understanding and hands on experience in the area you are interested in writing articles. You should or try to express yourself and make the readers enjoyable. Have some patience; it might take few weeks, months or years to gain these skills. You need to have a defined set of goals before you start writing an article. Here are few tips to get started  

1.       First and foremost, make yourself available.

2.       Come up with a good topic that you wish to share. Start with the know concepts which you are most knowledgeable off.  

3.       Never say I will start tonight or tomorrow as it will never happen and you will keep postponing. Just do it right away when you had thought about writing one.

4.       Open up a text editor. Microsoft word, Office Org or if you wish you can use Google online word document etc.

5.       Ok now you had come to a point in sharing something to the world or with someone and opened up a blank document, now you might be wondering how to keep going. Here’s what you need to do.

a)      You have to list the topics that you wish to cover. You don’t have to be too specific. Just jot down all the topics that you are interesting in sharing.

b)      If you slice any technical article, all it contains is a huge blocks of texts, images, code snippets, flowcharts etc. Mostly every single developer would be interested in learning the concepts with the implementation. So it’s always good to come up with code samples as you don’t want to make the readers to get bored with a bunch of theoretical concepts.

c)       Start with a draft copy and keep going and try to express your thoughts.

d)      Once you have a draft copy, you can read yourself and see whether it makes some sense. You may have to do some minor corrections or add missing explanations etc. You can do all these things in no time.

e)      It’s always a good practice to have someone look into your article and proof read the same. As they might come up with suggestions that will help in improving article.