Moving from Medium
I've been posting on Medium for a couple of years now and found it a really useful. The art of writing and articulating technical topics has helped me grow and develop as a technical leader. Around the time I started posting on Medium, I also started speaking at meet-ups (in person pre-pandemic and virtually since) and I've carried on with an MSc degree specialising in Software Engineering which is due to finish in 6 weeks time (and counting!) both of which have all contributed to the process.
My degree has been about 3.5 years now, part-time on weekends while I work full time, so it's taken a lot of my weekends and evenings in that time. As it comes to an end I've been thinking about how to spend that time. One thing I want to get back into is professional certifications. I've always been big on Microsoft certifications and prior to my degree I had an MCSD that I kept current with each upgrade of .NET. Since I started my degree, Microsoft certifications have all changed from the "70-" exams of MCSD to the newer "AZ-" Azure certification paths. I've already taken my first step down that route, passing the "AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals" exam a couple of weeks ago. I'll probably look to do "AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure" next. I'm lucky enough that the company I work for, FirstPort, encourage us to do the Microsoft certs so I'm looking forward to doing more beyond that. I might do a MuleSoft certification as well as we use that for our API integration layer.
From the writing side though, I've decided to move away from Medium for a couple of reasons:
Primarily they are changing their earning model to enforce a minimum number of followers to put your posts behind their paywall and earn money from them. I've enjoyed earning money from posts, it makes it more interesting (and useful) than just looking at number of likes. One of my posts got over 10,000 views and has made about $300 in the last year. It's not enough to retire on but posting about an article a month has made around $500 across the year. Not a bad little return on the time investment, I'm posting anyway and, like I mentioned above, I've learned a lot from the process. The earnings side will go though unless I play the followers game on Medium and I don't really want to do that. Yes, I could spend a day following a lot of people, replying and clapping on a lot of posts and writing a post pleading for people to follow me to hit the minimum. This is what other posters are saying they've done and it's got them to the minimum followers but I didn't start posting to play that game.
I've found that the popular articles on Medium are the ones that have a click-bait title and aim for a controversial perspective on a topic, probably as Medium is flooded with articles that all say the same thing so it's a way to standout and get noticed. I was starting to write articles with that in mind and I don't really want to do that as I don't feel it reflects my personal branding.
I'm hoping with a blog here on hashnode, that allows me to use a personalised domain, I can get back to a writing style that feels more personal and reflects my knowledge and experience in Software Development and leading Software Engineering teams.
I'm very much looking forward to sharing more here in coming weeks and months, especially come April when my degree finishes and I get my free time back!
In the meantime, if you would like to check out some of my articles on Medium, have a look here