My Blogging Strategy in Times of Dead Blogging

Blogging is dead. At least, that’s what almost everybody claims.

And it’s been dead for years. But in spite of that belief, we still find (random and famous) people writing on their blogs: Seth Godin, Herbert Lui, and me (shameless plug).

With blogs, we have control but lose distribution

In our blogs, we aren’t at the mercy of third-party platforms and their algorithms.

A blog is a place you own. You can redesign it and write anything you want. It’s like your small kingdom. And I like to think of my blog as my time capsule.

But blogs don’t have a distribution mechanism.

Apart from search engines and cross-posting, there’s no “feed” for blogs. Well, there’s RSS, but you still have to find a blog in the first place to add it to your RSS reader.

Distribution is where social media truly shines. Unlike blogs, social media shine at putting content in front of readers. This means we can see traction way faster on social media compared to a blog sitting behind search engines.

But we don’t control our social media accounts.

A social media platform can change its rules at any time. Just take a look at Medium, everybody is complaining about getting lower payouts after a change in the algorithm.

Getting banned on social media is possible if you don’t behave.

We need a combination of both: social media for short-form content and blogs (and newsletters) for long-form content

Since 2024, I started to use my blog as my main hub for my content.

Ultimately, all my content ends up here on my blog in some shape or form. A single blog post ends up in multiple shorter posts for social media. And a short social media post can evolve into larger posts or sections. That’s my content wheel.

And I’m not only writing SEO-optimized 1,000-word posts about programming anymore.

Apart from coding and software engineering, I’m writing about my other interests. We’re not single-interest creatures. I’m not. I’m a multipotentialite. In fact, I created a new tag as a catch-all for my “other” content.

My new rule is that if an idea is larger than a Tweet, it can be a post.

When I cross-post on other platforms, I invite readers to my newsletter. And on every email I send, I promote two posts I write here and the products I’m building.

But if I had to start all over again today, I wouldn’t start with a blog. I’d go with a social media account and a newsletter.

Content Ideas Are Already There, You Just Need to Search for Them

“Money has already been made, we just have to get out and search for it.”

That’s a common phrase in my hometown. It means money rewards action. And like I learned from hearing and watching James Altucher, nobody wakes up and thinks about giving money to any of us. We have to search for it.

That applies to content ideas too. Replace “money” with “content” and you’ll get the same meaning.

When we wear our writer (or creative) glasses, there’s content everywhere:

• Books
• Questions
• Conversations
• Emails you reply to
• Projects you’re working on
• Comments you leave on social media
• Other people’s posts
• Situations at work
• TV shows

Everywhere.

For example, the other day I realized the same coworker had asked the same question about investing on a WhatsApp group. Then I wrote about it.

Another coworker asked me how to start writing on LinkedIn. Then I wrote about it.

Another day I was reading a book review. And I realized I had read the same book. I stopped reading and wrote my own review.

Another day I found a post I didn’t agree with. Then I wrote a reaction.

I felt guilty for binge-watching my favorite TV shows until I started to write about them. Now watching Netflix and TV shows is an excuse to write more content. Content is everywhere.

Missed the Last 10 Years of C#? Read This (Quick) Guide

Here’s an opinionated catch-up guide if you missed the last decade of the C#/.NET/Microsoft evolution.

#1. C# isn’t JAVA anymore. That joke doesn’t work anymore. The two languages have taken completely different paths. They don’t even look the same.

#2. There’s a new runtime: .NET. It’s multiplatform and open-sourced. We have the classic one, we call it: .NET Framework, which you probably already know. And the new one was called “.NET Core.” But now, it’s simply “.NET” Yes, naming is hard.

#3. Speaking of the language, the main language features are still there. C# is an imperative side-effect-heavy language. But with every release, it’s adopting more features from functional languages, like lambda expressions, pattern matching, and records. (See #7)

#4. There’s excellent support for asynchronous methods with two keywords: async and await.

#5. There’s a whole lot of new small language features. Apart from async/await (from C# 5.0) we haven’t had a release with a single major feature. Most of the new features are syntactic sugar for existing features.

#6. There’s a new feature you shouldn’t miss: nullable references. It should have been called: “non-nullable references” instead. Do you remember nullable primitive types? Like int?? We allow a type to contain null by appending a ? when declaring it. We can do the same for classes. So Movie? m can be null, but Movie m can’t. And the compiler warns us when we’re trying to use a reference that might be null. Awesome!

#7. I compiled a list of C# features we should know about. Those are the features I like and have used the most.

#8. A “Hello, world” is now literally one line of code. We don’t need to declare a class and a Main method for console applications. Just write your code directly in a file like in a scripting language.

#9. I stopped expanding that list with the most recent features. C# is getting bloated with more features that are making the language less consistent. I don’t like that.

#10. The same way we have a new runtime, we have a new web framework: ASP.NET Core. It was a full rewrite of the classic ASP.NET. There’s no Global.asax, web.config, or files listed on csproj files. If you knew and used the old ASP.NET, I wrote a guide with the difference between the two. With .NET, we have way better tooling like a command line interface to create projects.

#11. Well, there’s Xamarin, MAUI, Blazor… But unless you’re planning to do front-end work, you don’t need to worry about them. Microsoft is still trying to find, create, and establish a golden hammer for the front-end side.

Sure, I’m missing a lot of other things. But you’re safe catching up on those.

TIL: How To Ignore Unmapped Fields in the Destination Type With AutoMapper

Another day working with AutoMapper, another day with an edge case.

Let’s say we have class CreateMovieRequest with three properties: name, release year, and another property I don’t want to map, for some reason. And a destination class, Movie, with more properties apart from those three and names using a prefix.

Simply trying to use CreateMap<CreateMovieRequest, Movie>() won’t work. AutoMapper will warn you about unmapped properties in the destination type. “Unmapped members were found. Review the types and members below.”

Here’s how to map two classes ignoring the unmapped properties in the destination type and with prefixes:

using AutoMapper;

namespace TestProject1;

[TestClass]
public class IHateYouWilWheaton
{
    public class CreateMovieRequest
    {
        public string Name { get; set; }
        public int ReleaseYear { get; set; }
        public string IDontWantThisOneMapped { get; set; }
    }

    public class Movie
    {
        // These two aren't mapped from the source
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public int DurationInMinutes { get; set; }
        // These two have the 'Movie' prefix
        public string MovieName { get; set; }
        public int MovieReleaseYear { get; set; }
    }

    [TestMethod]
    public void IgnoringNotMappedProps()
    {
        var config = new MapperConfiguration(cfg =>
        {
            // Let's keep it here, shall we?
            cfg.RecognizeDestinationPrefixes("Movie");
            //  ^^^^^
            // To avoid explicitly mapping the fields because of the prefix

            // Before:
            // cfg.CreateMap<CreateMovieRequest, Movie>();
            //     ^^^^^
            // AutoMapper.AutoMapperConfigurationException: 
            // Unmapped members were found. Review the types and members below.
            // ...
            // Unmapped properties:
            // Id
            // MovieName
            // DurationInMinutes
            //
            //
            // After:
            cfg.CreateMap<CreateMovieRequest, Movie>(MemberList.Source)
                //                                   ^^^^^
                // To validate unmapped properties on the source type
                // Possible options: Source, Destination, and None			
                .ForSourceMember(src => src.IDontWantThisOneMapped, opt => opt.DoNotValidate());
                // ^^^^^
                // Since I don't want this one mapped for some reason
        });
        config.AssertConfigurationIsValid();

        var source = new CreateMovieRequest
        {
            Name = "Space Odyssey",
            ReleaseYear = 1968,
            IDontWantThisOneMapped = "Ok, if you say so"
        };

        var mapper = config.CreateMapper();
        var destination = mapper.Map<Movie>(source);

        Assert.AreEqual(destination.MovieName, source.Name);
        Assert.AreEqual(destination.MovieReleaseYear, source.ReleaseYear);
    }
}

The trick for prefixes is RecognizeDestinationPrefixes() and the one for warnings is passing any of Source, Destination, or None as a parameter to Map().

And to ignore an “incoming” property, ForSourceMember(), with DoNotValidate().

Et voilà!

You Don't Need a Published Book to Call Yourself a Writer

Is it a best-selling book? A Pulitzer-winning novel? A large newsletter? More than 1,000 articles published anywhere online?

When can we call ourselves “writers”?

I have to confess I’ve been reluctant to use “digital writer” or “technical writer” or “writer” as a title anywhere online, even though I’ve been writing in my small corner of the Internet since 2018.

But recently, watching this interview with Devon Eriksen on YouTube, I changed my mind about using the title “writer.” He says:

If you’ve written and you’ve gotten paid for it. You’re a writer.

After hearing that, I wasn’t afraid to change my tagline on social media and here on my blog.

Definitely, someone has asked me to write something and paid me for that. That was by pure accident or luck, thanks to sharing the tutorials I write here on my blog. That’s how I made my first internet money.

You don’t need to publish a book. Well, publishing a book isn’t that hard these days. James Altucher has a strategy to publish a book in 30 days.

You don’t need to write and publish a book to call yourself a writer. Find one person that will pay to write and start calling yourself a “writer.” I’m a writer. And you?