Plans for my blog

The goals I have for this Blog

As I have, I'm sure you have seen or read about personal branding. The idea that you and your content are assets. At play in a marketing strategy to sell yourself. Interested parties hire you or do business with you, based on the value your brand conveys.

Content marketing

People working in content marketing propose a paradigm shift from traditional marketing. Traditional marketers use their resources to coerce people. Ingraining into their minds the supposed awesomeness of their products.

They burn enormous budgets to deliver messages with poor engagement. Trying to cast as wide a net as possible.

In contrast, content marketers focus on providing high-value content to a particular audience. Word-of-mouth and strong high-value relationships with customer are much more desirable. And in the long run, make much more business sense.

In case you are interested, I have a couple of book recommendations for you:

• Be your own brand by Karl D. Speak and David McNally. Basic reading on the topic of personal branding.

• Content.inc & Epic Content Marketing both by Joe Pulizzi. Explain both on a conceptual and technical level how content marketing works. And why it works. Backed up by empirical data.

• Everybody Writes by Ann Handley. Very practical how to advice on writing, with a special focus on content marketing. It is a great book on writing, even if you are not interested in marketing.

• Contagious: why things catch on by Jonah Berger. This book is a compilation of years of scientific research on how and why things go viral. Distilled in what Jonah Berger calls the STEPPS framework. I will write about this in the future!

Unfair Advantage

I recently came across a little book called the unfair advantage by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba. The main thesis is that there are certain individual variables involved in success. That we either exploit or not. The MILES framework as they call it. An acronym for Money, Intelligence and Insight, Location and luck, Education and Expertise, and Status. No one has every one of them (for example I don't have money hahaha). But everyone at least has one or two. Thus, according to them, your success depends on luck, hard work, and how well you can make use of your own "unfair advantage".

I am not sure I subscribe to their thesis. As with any self-help, I am cautiously skeptical. Psychology, and Social science in general, are very HARD to get right. And need tons of empirical evidence to become even remotely believable.

Much of what touted as psychology on the internet is what philosophers cutely call "folk psychology". Common-sensical-sounding ideas that more often than not turn out to be completely wrong.

But it sure makes for an appealing way to frame your assets. If anything, it is useful as a heuristic for guiding your efforts.

The Unique Value Proposition

With that in mind. Consider another marketing term: the Unique Value Proposition or UVP. This is what gives you a competitive advantage over other players of the same field.

It doesn't take much imagination to put two and two together. The idea of personal brand, content marketing, unfair advantage, and Unique Value Proposition. They lead nicely into the idea of a strong brand.

My strong brand

In Be your own brand Speak and McNally say that a person with a strong brand utilizes their special qualities to make a difference in the lives of others.

So that's what I am aiming for.

Concrete plans

Whatever I have in mind for this blog. I'm hoping you come along for the ride! I plan to subdivide my blog into four different series.

If Plato knew JavaScript

Believe it or not, I used to be part of a Philosophy department. More specifically, an Epistemology and Philosophy of the Mind department. There are some very interesting ideas from philosophy that can be enlightening for software development. There is even a philosophy of software!

For now, suffice to say that a nice way to think about philosophy is as a systematic and rigorous way to question what you take for granted.

There is a lot to say, I hope to make it entertaining.

Will Code for Food

Many job requirements say they want people that can use React, Node.js, or whatnot. I tend to favor the theoretical side of things. I am not a very pragmatic person, at least in the pragmatic programmer sense.

I'll try to change that. This is the place where I'll make myself "hirable" by building projects with a more pragmatic approach. I'll "show my work" so to speak and share my GitHub repos.

A blog-ified portfolio of sorts.

100 Posts of (mostly) code

I want to pivot this series into an exploration of lower-level Computer Science fundamentals. From the obvious data structures and algorithms to not-so-obvious things like automata and languages.

Things I am still learning myself. I am no expert. But I think I am a fast learner.

Writing Everyday

Here I just have two general goals. First to build and keep a daily writing habit. And second, to improve my writing and communication skills.

Other than that, any random topic can fit here. Perhaps the occasional digital drawing tutorial!

Epilogue

As you may be guessing by now, I read a lot. But reading by itself is useless if I don't share what I learn. I hope I make it worth your time!

See you tomorrow!