February 28, 2021
Happy sunday!
One of the most difficult things about writing content is that sometimes you just can’t come up with anything new to write about.
This is a general problem with any type of creative endeavour. Sometimes the juices just do not flow.
However, the consumers do not care about this and if you ve committed to delivering content every week, you must do it.
One thing that really helps me come up with stuff to write about is to find out what folks are searching for on google.
So with the help of this chrome extension called keywords everywhere, I figured out that a lot of people are having difficulty handling time zone support in their Django applications.
That’s when I realised that I faced this problem myself and voila! I now had something to write about.
This process for coming up with content to write about has worked well in the past and I highly recommend it for anybody who wants to get into writing.
But just knowing what to write about does not suffice. You actually have to come up with quality content that delivers value to people.
To that end, I just tried using my best judgement on how to write a crisp and informative article that delivers value in the shortest possible time.
I used my past experiences as a compass to do this. When I am in the middle of development and stuck at a problem, I am usually looking for a quick solution and do not really want to read an entire ebook on the subject.
But having said that, just writing a couple of paragraphs wont work, because you must first establish some context and reel in the reader. Therefore a healthy balance of quantity and quality is needed.
As mentioned earlier, this week I wrote about how time zones are handled in Django.
In this piece I gave a brief introduction on how time zones work in general and how the world came up with a way to have a common standard of time to stay in sync.
The inspiration for this piece came from a problem that I constantly faced while developing Django applications.
I would forget to specify the time zone and therefore the application would behave differently in different environments based on the local time zone of the computer that it is running on.
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See you next Sunday ✌️