For a long time, I used to blog here on eclectic topics, and use the WDSS-II Blog for work-related posts but when I joined Climate Corporation, blogging pretty much stopped -- it was unclear what I could write about and what I couldn't. The only blog post I ended up writing was on Climate's Engineering blog (Big Data, Cloud and NOAA's CRADA with AWS) and even this involved lengthy legal approval. Incidentally, years after I left NSSL, I notice that mine was the last post, and months after I left Climate, I notice that my team's posts are the last posts.
At Google, too, my first instinct was to write a programming-related post on the Google Cloud Platform Big Data blog (How to forecast demand using Google BigQuery, public datasets, and TensorFlow) but it seemed out of place amidst product and launch announcements.
That's when I looked around to see what my media-savvy colleagues were up-to. Based on this, I diversified in two ways.
First was into video series. For example, I scripted the idea and wrote the code that underlies this episode (Querying across big and small datasets using Google BigQuery and Sheets). Video might be the wave of the future -- 2400 views in a matter of days is amazing. As you can see from my description, though, videos require teams -- scripting, recording, animation, etc. It is definitely more work than simply writing code and text.
The other option is to publish on medium -- it's individually driven like a typical blog post, but technical posts are not out-of-place. Also, there is a community of Google Developer Advocates on there to publicize the posts. So, I signed up and published my first medium post this weekend:
Open-source Java Projects that could use some help (analyzed using Dataflow and BigQuery)
For good measure, I tweeted it too:
Which open-source Java projects could use your help [tweet]
Together, this seems to be a good strategy.
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