Slite, the company I was working in early 2023, did a lay-off round and reduced their team size by 25% in order to cut costs.

I was one of the employees that was laid-off and thus the question of what was next for me came quite quickly.

I soon realized (most of) all my work in the company has been done in private and so I had nothing to show to showcase my abilities when talking to companies for new positions.

So I decided I would finally start a personal blog (astro, hosted on cloudflare) and try to write a good chunk of articles as soon as possible. Although I didn't write as much as I wanted because other things came up, I have a few ideas but mostly this allowed me to realize I wanted to improve on a few areas.

1. Exposure

This is the obvious one and the reason it was created the blog in the first place. I need a showroom to show my work and how I approach problems/product requirements.

With time, I want to write more and in an interactive way. There are a lot of neat solutions nowadays to embed pretty much everything in a web page and sometimes images (or running code) are better than words.

2. Improve my technical writing

English is not my native language and I believe I can greatly improve my communication. This means being better at formalizing ideas and sharing them as clearly as possible.

This will hopefully help me work better in public but also be a better teammate/mentor to my colleagues (present and future).

Sharing ideas/approaches in a clear meaningful way is a great power and skill I want to develop.

3. Solidify my knowkedge

I recently started mentoring a friend who is switching industries to become a full stack developer.

I have done this in the past and always liked doing it so when he came asking if I was interested I naturally accepted.

This is one of the best ways I found to check my skills and communication level. Indeed I found rather fast that it is only when you start teaching a concept that you can understand how deep/exactly you understand it.

It was Nicolas Boileau who said: What is well conceived is clearly expressed. And the words to say it come easily.

So I'll take every blog post as an opportunity as well to strengthen my knowledge and dig deep before I share the things I find interesting.