I had just published my first blog post on shanenolan.io, a work of art, a masterpiece some might say. I was on a bloggers high, but already looking for another fix. I recalled recently speaking with my colleague Drew about my experience with AWS exams and her ongoing experience studying for the Comptia Security+ exam. Drew had also just authored an interesting blog on bounce rates, which uses one of my favourite websites ( spacejam.com ) as a case study (therefore immediately peaking my interest). With her being in a similar position to myself, wanting to continue writing as soon as possible, we set up a call to discuss working together.
The next time we spoke, we threw around some suggestions and eventually settled on a topic which would essentially articulate her decision to pursue Security+ specifically. The blog would ask and answer the question Is the Security+ exam worth it? Coming from different backgrounds we could each offer unique insights, her, an experienced product manager, and me, a platform security engineer. I figured that between the two of us, we should be able to construct at least a few coherent sentences on the topic.
In reality, selecting the precise wording of the titular question involved more of an iterative approach, and the first piece of advice I would offer to any aspiring bloggers is to spend some time thinking about your audience, and what they should get out of the post. As we refined our audience, we subsequently had to modify our content. This involved a lot of chopping and changing, and you need to be prepared to let things go, if something is not relevant to your audience, it doesn’t matter how well written or intelligent it is, it doesn’t add any value. In fact it can actually do more damage than good and lead to a confusing and disorientating read.
Fast forward a couple of days later, it’s the weekend before Christmas and we have two people working in different timezones on a shared google document, each with their own set of questions and writing styles (not to mention the specialize v specialise controversy or the resume v CV debate). It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it actually turned out to be an awe inspiring, festive tale of friendship, agile practices and project management. Some day there will be a movie about it so sorry in advance about the spoilers…
We had agreed on the general topic and some sub topics, we knew where the blog had to start and finish, and we sort of knew where the middle had to be. So jumping back to Google docs, we used questions formatted as headings as our pseudo requirements, and bullet points to create the skeleton of a blog. We then primarily used a divide and conquer approach to start fleshing out the bullet points under each heading, proof reading and building on each others work as we went. We used comments/sticky notes to offer each other encouragement, feedback and support, or constructive criticism where required (such as Drew very politely asking me to stop talking about kicking in someones server). We also had some rough work pages dedicated to our miscellaneous thoughts, snippets ready to be pulled into the finished piece if the scope allowed for it. Unfortunately this meant a lot of content we researched and wrote didn’t make the cut, but it was a great lesson in discipline, collectively maintaining focus and sticking to the requirements.
The real beauty of the process was the agile/iterative approach we took, small cycles of work followed by a review, and a redesign when required. This enabled us to adapt to change quickly, ensured we never went too far away from the main topic, and allowed us to develop an efficient, and beautifully cohesive writing style. This process allowed us to go from idea generation to publication in a matter of hours (spaced out over the course of a few days). If you get the opportunity to co-author a blog, I really can’t recommend it highly enough. You won’t always know for sure how it will work out or what you’re going to get, but if we learned anything from Space Jam its that even the most unlikely teams can achieve greatness when they work together. To check out the finished product click here
