Introducing Weekly Articles Challenge

It's a new year and the time is just appropriate enough to determine how you'd want your year to run. One of your goals for this year may be to learn a lot in tech and you'd probably be looking towards reading books, articles, watching tutorials and many other means.

But how about writing technical articles?

This post does not go in deep to what technical writing is, but what you should know about technical writing is that;

Tehnical writing is a type of writing where the author is writing about a particular subject that requires direction direction, instruction or explanation - grammar.yourdictionary.com

Personally, my goal for this year was to engage more in technical writing than I did last year. Yesterday (3rd January, 2020), I got a challenge idea.

"Why not write at least 2 articles per week?"

I decided to invite the community. I threw it out to everyone on twitter and I got encouraging feedbacks on people willing to join. Here's the tweet.

2 (short or long) articles per week 🤔
This should be an awesome challenge for 2020.

Would be doing this as long as I can this year.

Who's in with me? 👋#2Articles1Week#100DaysOfCode #webdev

— Dillion Megida 🚀🤶 (@iamdillion) January 3, 2020

Check out the tweet

Straight to the challenge

Purpose

The main purpose of this challenge is to Commit yourself to a learning strategy. Because, while writing about things you know or not, you're learning. Could be by research or watching videos to understand the topic well before writing.

Other purposes include;

• Improve your writing skills
• Share your knowledge with people

Type of articles

It's not compulsory to write a documentation for how SEO works.

As long as you're writing, learning and teaching, you're still part of the challenge. The type of articles here include

• Tutorials (short or long) e.g How to create a navbar with bootstrap
• What things are (short or long) e.g What is HTML?
• What things do (short or long) e.g The function of map() in javascript arrays
• ...As long as you're writing, learning and teaching

So for those who may feel, "What do I know?", my answer is "You know a lot. There's just much more that you could learn".

In a week, you could write about two array methods in javascript or the uses of two attributes in HTML.

How to Engage

Engaging in this is simple. And remember, it's a personal commitment not a group work. To engage,

1. Make a public commitment

This refers to a tweet on twiiter stating how to plan to write articles weekly. Twitter is our use case because the community is large.

Research has it that people who commit to goals publicly usually keep to them better than private commitments. Another reason why this is stated is so that you can also in your own way invite people to the challenge. We are all learning right?

2. Share your articles weekly (on Twitter) with #2Articles1Week and Week Number

Example:

WEEK 1 - From 3rd to 9th January, I wrote two articles - https://a-writing-medium.com/getting-started-with-html and https://a-writing-medium.com/basics-of-css. #2Articles1Week

Weekly is compulsory but if for any reason, a week is not enough, you can share the articles on the second week (hence sharing 4 articles).

3. Congratulate yourself

Within a week, you undeniably learnt a thing or two, to add with that, you wrote two articles, so congratulate yourself.

However,

If two articles seem to be a big challenge, you could start with one. Use the #1Article1Week hashtag when sharing.

It's called a challenge just to make you focus (same reason why you committed publicly). But you shouldn't chase unfeasible goals.

Also note that you can write more than 2 articles in a week. In some weeks, you may just be lucky to have many contents to put out, so it's still part of it. You can share all articles you write in a week.

Where to write

The last question which you were probably waiting for a response.

There are several mediums for this. I'll list a few but you could get more.

• You personal blog: If you have a personal blog, you could write there. If you don't, check out the other options.
• Dev.to: A community for technical writers. Plus, it's free. Sign up there and you could start writing.
• Hashnode: Similar to the above community. Plus, you also get your own domain (yourname.hashnode.dev)
• and many more...

Conclusion

Well, I guess the challenge has be explained enough. If you need more clarifications, kindly reach me on twitter - @iamdillion

#2Articles1Week is officially launched 🚀

Commit to the Challenge Now!