blogging

Getting back to blogging, again

| Vasily Belolapotkov

Life is generous for surprises of all flavors …

That’s how the last Getting back to blogging post starts. It was published on Feb 20th, 2022. On that day I was sure the storm is over and had no idea about upcoming challenges. 

Russia-Ukraine conflict which started on Feb 24th, 2022 has put many lives under stress test, including my own. I don’t want to talk or write about the conflict because I don’t know a lot, and neither I have possibility to validate any of the controversy communicated in the news. For now, I just want to acknowledge that this big change triggered another chain of events in my life where I had to make many choices and take actions. As a result, my fragile blogging beginning was dropped and abandoned, again. 

Luckily, it wasn’t forgotten completely. I was thinking about writing from time to time, and even had some interesting ideas for blog posts, but I didn’t have enough courage, energy and time to write. I even felt guilty sometimes and ashamed of not writing anything because I was aware of broken commitment to publish a post per week.

So here goes an interesting leadership lesson I learned after initial shock had passed.  Conscious reset of priorities is necessary at extreme conditions like this, or when the context you operate within changes significantly. I found that the following steps are important for proper reset: 

  1. Acknowledge the changes.
  2. Start/stop/continue. Figure out what you should start doing, continue doing, and stop doing.
  3. Make priorities for things left on your plate explicit. Any prioritization technique would work.
  4. Accept it and communicate to others involved.

I did it for many things at my job and in my life to some extent, but definitely I could do better with blogging. Today I realize that blogging wasn’t the top priority at the moment, but I didn’t accept it then, didn’t give myself permission not to write, and haven’t communicated about it anywhere. 

Now, it’s almost four months passed. New lessons learned, I moved to another country, I feel myself in a much better position today, and ready to give another try to blog. The little blogger within me was knocked out, but luckily there is no referee who would count to ten and stop the fight. Luckily, I can start blogging again.

It was great to go back and reread blogging experiment post to remind myself those five why’s behind this blog:

1. I got curious about the blogging world and the technology driving it. There are lots of tools and practices helping people to deliver useful content to the audience and I’d like to learn them.

2. Automattic creates lots of great products but there is always room for improvement, so by using our own products as a customer I’ll be able to provide valuable feedback to internal teams and make publishing on the web even better.

3. I want to join the community of bloggers and hopefully make some new connections across the globe.

4. Share my knowledge, thoughts, and experiences with readers at the highest quality I’m able to provide.

5. I’m curious how far I can get in the long term doing baby steps every single day.

Blogging experiment post

Leaders of the world, STOP WAR!

| Vasily Belolapotkov
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

This blog is about leadership, tech and my personal life, but I can’t write about that ignoring the conflict going on in Ukrain these days. It’s terrible and wrong, it’s devastating physically and emotionally for those who feel powerless to stop it and magnitude worse for those who are directly involved 😢

In my opinion, chosen leaders of many countries failed. They were supposed to resolve conflict by communication and negotiations, but not war. I doubt any politician will read it, but I’ll still say it anyway.

Russian, EU and US leaders, who are in charge, you can’t undo all the terrible events already happened, but you still have chance to prevent further damage. Stop playing gods and ruining people lives! Stop this war! Get back to communication and peace!

Getting back to blogging

| Vasily Belolapotkov
Photo by Ivan Samkov on Pexels.com

It’s been about a month since I published my last post – book review for Indistractable. I know I planned to write 30 minutes a day and one post per week as part of my blogging experiment, but so many things happened to me so far that I had to drop the experiment to digest the life. Keep reading for more details about my adventures.

Role switch. I got a new role at Automattic – Director of Engineering for Transact Merchant Experience group at Woo 🎉 That’s both exciting opportunity for me and big challenge at the same time, because I have never led other leads before. It takes time and energy to transition and settle in the new role, but I’m surrounded by great people and professionals, feel supported by my leads and excited about the plans we have this year! Follow WooCommerce.com site and social media for updates.

Vaccination in Croatia. The decision of going to the other country for vaccination sounds weird taking into account several vaccines are available locally in Russia and there is no need to wait for it. However, none of the local vaccines are approved by EU and US authorities, making it hard to travel for work, so I went to Zagreb for COVID vaccination (some nice images from the trip are here). It didn’t go perfect – I was able to got a shot which is great, but unfortunately I got sick a few hours later, and it took me a whole week to fully recover from it. Everything is good now, and I received my EUDCC (EU Digital COVID Certificate).

Moving. Another surprise was awaiting me on return from Croatia. We had to move out of the place we rented with the family, urgently, almost without any notice. That was a very stressful and exhausting experience: looking for places, calling all the agents, arranging meetings, and running around the area to check potential places (we decided to stay in the same area due to convenient logistics for kid’s school). Luckily, we’d found a very nice apartment quickly and moved in within a single week 🤯 It took another two weeks to unpack and get used to the new place.

Now. It feels like the storm is over. Each of the events would be fine to handle on its own, but not all of them in such a short period. Now I’m good, enjoying a calm weekend, started seeing friends, doing some sports and ready to get back to blogging 😌 I’m grateful to all the people around who supported me over those weeks. I also started building plans for the future, both personal and work-related. Those are exciting, and I’m looking forward to making them real.

I’m glad to be back on track with my life and blogging!

Voice behind the blog

| Vasily Belolapotkov
Photo by Dmitry Demidov on Pexels.com
Audio recording of this post

I’m pretty new to blogging but what I like about it so far is that it’s a great way of sharing an individual perception of reality. That’s why I think the author’s identity is an essential part of the blog. That’s why many blogs have an “About” page and it’s a great way of getting familiar a bit with the author of the posts you read and hopefully enjoy.

Another great thing about people is they are very different and creative by nature and that applies to their blogs and about pages as well. However, so far I’ve seen only text and images as the most common content on the about page, mine about page is not exclusion. That’s perfectly fine, especially if you like me have the good old stereotype that “blogging is writing and writing is text and images”. However, Blogging for beginners course by WordPress.com Courses and folks at Automattic, challenged that setting in my head, and I realized it’s not like that anymore. Somehow my brain ignored the fact that video-based services like YouTube, Instagram (to some extent), Tik-Tok, and so on have millions of content creators who are bloggers. Podcasts became very popular too and can be considered voice-based blogging! So why not use voice, audio, and video in the classical web-based blog?! Why not use other media in addition to text and image on the About page to share your identity with readers and establish a better connection?! I don’t have a good answer for you 😛

So here we are, got to the point and the key purpose of this post – to connect the dots and give you a chance to hear the voice behind the blog. I don’t know yet if I’ll make audio recordings of the following posts, but I smile every time when I imagine how my voice sounds in your head while you read the posts.

Thanks for listening/reading and hope you’re not annoyed by the voice 🙂

My blogging experiment

| Vasily Belolapotkov
Photo by RF._.studio on Pexels.com

TLDR; This is my second attempt to start blogging on a regular basis, but this time it’s more about writing and creating content for the audience rather than building a personal blog with fancy frameworks for developers. Keep reading for more details and ideas behind this blogging experiment.

Story & history

I’ve never considered myself an outstanding writer and was admired by all those people creating and publishing content over the internet. Often I thought “I’m not smart enough”, “I don’t have anything outstanding to share”, or “everybody knows this, so why would I publish the same”. However, with time I’ve noticed, there is a lot of overlapping content, found some posts describing the fears of beginner writers and got other positive signals that encouraged me to start. And I started, but (there is always some but in the good stories) it didn’t work out 😄 Here is what I did wrong the first time – I tried to do two big things at once: build a custom blog from scratch with a modern framework (that deserves its own story) and create content. Both required reasonable time, effort, and knowledge I didn’t have, so I stuck pretty soon and abandoned this idea.

These days I’m proudly working at Automattic – the company has a common history with WordPress and develops many other great products for the web. I write a lot internally and improved my writing skills significantly over the last months so the idea of getting back to blogging has been revolving in my head for a while. Luckily I came across an internal post about a blogging group, read a few posts and stories from other Automatticians about their journey in blogging, got inspired and come with an idea of my own blogging experiment.

My 5 whys

The purpose of the initiative is of large importance for me, that’s why I want to be clear about why I’m going to do anything. Here are my whys for this experiment:

  1. I got curious about the blogging world and the technology driving it. There are lots of tools and practices helping people to deliver useful content to the audience and I’d like to learn them.
  2. Automattic creates lots of great products but there is always room for improvement, so by using our own products as a customer I’ll be able to provide valuable feedback to internal teams and make publishing on the web even better.
  3. I want to join the community of bloggers and hopefully make some new connections across the globe.
  4. Share my knowledge, thoughts, and experiences with readers at the highest quality I’m able to provide.
  5. I’m curious how far I can get in the long term doing baby steps every single day.

Experiment

Here are few words about my vision of experiment:

  1. I’ll spend at least 30 mins/day creating: writing posts, learning, doing backstage tasks (need to learn them first).
  2. My target is to write at least 1 post/week.
  3. Reading other blogs is also learning, so I’m aiming to read at least one blog post per day (on average). Maybe will read several posts but not every day.
  4. Experiment duration: at least 1 year. Until September 6, 2022.

That’s it, very simple, isn’t it? But looks challenging enough to me 🙂

What I’m going to write about?

That’s a great question! At the moment the plan is to write about something close to me like software development, leadership in IT, book reviews, and some personal stuff and thoughts. But who knows where this blogging journey will lead me to.

Follow the blog for more content! At the moment I think only authorized WordPress.com users can subscribe and follow it, but hopefully, I’ll find a way to improve it soon so anybody interested will be able to subscribe via email and other media. Stay tuned and have fun!