Hello dear Reader!
Let me outline a short story for you.
Mumbling on the street with a bucket on your head
You get up, early in the morning. To boot your day, you drink a coffeeand maybe also smoke a cigarette (at least I do that).
A quick shower, dress up, and 10 minutes later, you are down on the street.
It is still quite early, but many people are walking to work, not looking up from their phones at all.
You stop at the side of the street.
You clear your throat, take a deep breath, put a bucket on your head and then.
You start mumbling.
One word leaves your mouth after the other.
Sometimes you pause for a second, but then you continue in a hurry.
After a few minutes, you stop.
You take off the bucket from your head and go home.
A few hours later, you are at home wondering.
Wondering because:
You have no idea whether somebody was on the street around you.
You have no idea whether somebody has heard your words.
You have no idea how long were they listening.
You have no idea whether they were women or men.
You have no idea where the listeners are from.
You have no idea how old are they.
You have no idea whether somebody has understood what you were trying to say.
You have no idea how many of them liked what you were saying.
You have no idea what do they think about your message.
You have no idea whether your message changed their thought process.
You have no idea whether your message affected their actions or not.
You have no idea whether they are spreading your words or not.
And finally,
You have no idea whether you had a message at all.
Is this story sounds familiar?
No?
Well, this is the story of my first few weeks of blogging on Hashnode.
Luckily I am continuously improving myself, not just in development, testing and personality-wise, but also in writing.
The RWRR(Read-Write-Reflect-Repeat) method to raise your writing to the next level
There are 4 steps that you have to do to radically improve your writing:
- Read
- Write
- Reflect
- Repeat
Let's examine them one by one.
Read - The 1st pillar of quality writing
Reading!
To learn writing, you have to readโa lot. And even more than that.
By reading a lot, you will quickly realise how easy to skim through an article if it is well-structured, but you also learn that it is hell to read an article that consists of one paragraph.
No matter what, I almost always immediately close such articles. It is just not efficient to waste my time on it.
You also quickly get a good grasp of what a good title looks like.
You can get a hell of a lot of ideas for your upcoming articles, too.
And you can even create your Newsletter from the articles you read.
Do not you believe me?
Just check the latest Hashnode Weekly 004 by Miki Szeles. ๐
There is much more thing you can learn from reading, but I am already writing a separate article on this topic so that I won't list more here.**
But to raise your curiosity I leave the title here for you:
How to write an article just about almost anything?
Stay tuned. It will come in the next few weeks. ๐
I am personally reading 80+ Hashnode articles weekly. That is 80+ opportunities to learn something new or have new ideas. Weekly.
Write - The 2nd pillar of quality writing
Learning the theory is good, but it does not worth anything in case you do not put it into practice.
That is why the 2nd pillar of excellent writing is:
Writing itself!
By now, you already read a lot, especially about the subject you would like to write about.
Stop for a second and slap yourself on the back; you are already better than 90% of the bloggers in the world (No, of course, I am not talking about Hashnode bloggers (Hloggersโข๏ธ). Hloggers are cool. Hloggers are very cool. ๐).
So by doing it, you can put everything you learned by reading into practice.
You can find a catchy title and an even catchier cover image.
You can structure your writing so your users can easily navigate it.
And much more. Just read my upcoming article to learn more. ๐
Experiment with different writing lengths to find the size which best suits you.
Of course, you can write articles of any length, but it is good to be aware of which is the perfect length for you.
At the moment for me, this is around 13 minutes of reading time, but it tends to get longer.
Last but not least:
Read your article multiple times. Don't ask why; just do it! It is enough to say thank you to me later, whenever you realise the value of self-reading. ๐
Reflect - The 3rd pilar of quality writing
Here we are at the 3rd pilar of excellent writing:
Reflection!
You have already read and written so it is time to think about what you can learn from it.
This is the point where you realise you have nothing based on which you can reflect on your previous writing.
If you are lucky, you might have got around a dozen reactions and 1-2 thanks comments on your article, but that's all you know.
So the question which is emerging from this situation, which I will answer in this article, is:
How to collect the feedback for your writing and how to reflect based on that?
But before answering the question, let's talk about the 4th pilar of excellent quality.
Repeat - The 4th pilar of excellent quality
Doing the Read-Write-Reflect once is great, but you won't improve too much in case you do not do it regularly.
I count as a Hashnode newbie, as I am only blogging here for 1,5 months, but I already had 38 iterations during this short period.
I am not telling you to do the same, as not everybody is as crazy as I am, but I do recommend doing it just a little bit more often than you are comfortable with.
In order to progress, it is crucial to step out of your comfort zone every time. Just a little bit, but still every time.
I cannot tell you exactly how much I improved during this time, but here is a list that I count as advancement:
- I went from 0 to 200+ daily views which I was able to achieve during the last weeks consistently. On my best day, I had 4479 page views, and I was able to attract more than 1000 readers for four consecutive days
- My follower count went from 0 to 143
- The average reading lengths of my posts went from ~2 to 10+.
- With Hashnode Weekly, I can consistently reach 200+ views
- I have developed a Call To Action consisting of 6 elements. More about this later.
- From starting blogging on LinkedIn and Hashnode, I have greatly extended my audience by blogging also on Medium.com, dev.to and hackernoon.
- I became much better at coming up with catchy titles
- From the point of primarily using a stock image, I arrived at the point where I usually composite my cover photos from multiple images.
- I got contacted by a company, to write articles for them, of course. This is still a secret, but I will let you know when I will start posting also on their platform.
- I use way fewer expletive words
- My English grammar and vocabulary improved so much I very often think in English instead of Hungarian. I also started to take notes in English at the university on the Data Analysis class (which is educated in Hungarian), as I can easily reuse my notes for my blog posts this way.
- However finding your unique voice is a never-ending process, but I still think I was able to form a style, from which even people who do not know I am the writer of the article could recognise I wrote it. Of course, I might be wrong, so please share your thoughts in the comment section. ๐
I am sure I could continue the listing, but let's focus on keeping focus.
That was the Read-Write-Reflect-Repeat (RWRR) method.
Haha. If you googled for the abbreviation RWRR, you must know by now that there is no such thing as the Read Write Reflect Refactor Method.
At least there was no such method up till now.
Happy 0th birthday, dear Read Write Reflect Repeat(RWRR) method. โค๐๐
Let's back to the main questions:
How to collect the feedback for your article and how to reflect based on that?
Please let me bring back my story from the beginning of this article.
I have updated it.
Can you spot the difference?
Mumbling on the street with a bucket on your head revisited
You get up early in the morning. To boot your day, you drink a coffee and maybe also smoke a cigarette (at least I do that).
A quick shower, dress up, and 10 minutes later, you are down on the street.
It is still relatively early, but many people walk to work, not looking up from their phones.
You stop at the side of the street.
You slip out a small camera from your pocket, put it beside you and hit the recording button.
You clear your throat, take a deep breath, put a bucket on your head.
You start mumbling.
One word leaves your mouth after the other.
Sometimes you pause for a second, but then you continue in a hurry.
After a few minutes, you stop.
You took off the bucket from your head, slip you're camera into your pocket and went home.
A few hours later, you are at home wondering.
Again.
But this time, it is different.
You have a video recording.
Analyzing the recorded video
You cannot record your reader with a video camera, can you?
However some companies still think the best way to motivate people is to record their screen and web camera while they are working, you should not do that.
But I have great news.
You do not need to do that, as there is a better solution for that:
Analytics!
Whether it is Hashnode's built-in analytics, Google Analytics or something else.
So let's revisit our questions to see which of them can be answered by analytics.
You have no idea whether somebody was on the street around you
It is straightforward. Just check the visit count of your article, which will tell you how many people passed the road.
You have no idea whether somebody has heard your words
This one is called bounce-rate.
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who immediately left after opening the page without spending a second.
Fun fact #1: This was the first time I used an equation in an article. I have used a free online formula editor mathcha.io. It is straightforward to use. ๐
So let's calculate how many people heard my mumbling for some of my articles:
So we already know how many people heard us mumbling.
This will be useful, as all other measurements are relative to this value.
You have no idea how long were they listening.
This one is also simple as you can get it from the analytics directly:
Quite impressive numbers, especially the last one, as it is an article with 2 minutes read time.
I have no idea what the hell my readers were doing on that page. ๐
We know how long the people were listening to our mumbling.
The logic is very simple here:
The more, the better. ๐
You have no idea whether they were women or men
I support gender equality from all my heart and mind.
I even dedicated two articles to the Women in Tech:
My articles are gender independent. I won't use a different tone, and I won't have another message because I have more women or men readers.
But depending on the topic you are writing about, it can count for you.
If you are writing a blog about parenting or you give tips on makeup, you should know how many women and men are reading your articles, as you can tailor your articles to them.
You have no idea where the listeners are from
Here are my statistics:
At the moment, I am using this information for two purposes:
- Finding the right time for posting. I am in GMT+1, but as most of my readers are from India, posting my articles when they are awake might make sense.
The daily distribution of your readers can also be determined by Google Analytics so that it might make more sense to time your posts based on that.
- To guess the name of my readers. True story. Read my article "QA Vs Dev AKA Bug Vs Feature AKA A Never Ending Debate AKA The 7 Testing Principles Explained By Miki Szeles" which will come in a few days. Don't forget to follow me so you won't miss it. ๐
You have no idea how old are they
Well, this information is not relevant to me. I am targeting the whole (tech) community.
Just look around here on Hashnode.
There are 12 years old bloggers and also 50+ bloggers here on Hashnode.
Blogging is ageless.
But again, this might be relevant for you.
You might write cause you would like to help teenagers get into the tech world or give career advice to people who would like to become software developers.
In these cases, it is important to know their age, as you can better tailor your articles towards them.
It does matter whether the teenagers or their parents are reading your articles.
You have no idea how many of them liked what you were saying or not.
- Hi Miki! Thanks for joining us for an interview. I am thrilled you are here. I just heard your mumbling on the street the other day, and you raised my curiosity.
- Hi Miki! Nice to meet you. Yeah, I was mumbling. I am happy to get to know that I was able to grab your attention. It is very hard these days.
- Yeah. I know. Can we start?
- Sure!
- As you said, you have no idea how many of your readers liked what you were saying.
You can count on me. So you have one listener indeed.
- Thanks, that is very kind of you.
- So, how can you tell whether your readers liked your story or not?
- It is easy, Miki, we have ten different emojis with which you can react to a post:
๐๐ฆ๐โค๐บ๐๐ฐ๐๐๐
And there are even crazy bloggers like you who push all the 10 in case they like an article.
- Yes, that's valid, but I am sorry to say this,
bloggers are lazy as hell get tired by the time they read your article.
- So what is the solution then?
- You have to ask them nicely to react to your article, and of course, you have to lead by example. ๐
Fun fact #2: This was the first time I used strike-through in an article. Unfortunately, I have not found a way to do it with Hashnode markdown, but as Hashnode also supports embedded HTML, you can easily do it by:
<s>bloggers are lazy as hell</s> get tired when they read your article.
Fun fact #3: As I did not want to look like a loser, I checked the Hashnode markdown guide, and I found out Hashnode supports Latex equations. Let's try it out quickly:
$$
\lim\limits_{visitors \to \infty} \exp(visitors) = to the Moon
$$
In case you open your article, and you see all the ten emojis are there, you can be almost sure that:
- Miki Szeles read your article.
- Miki Szeles found your writing valuable.
- Your article will be featured in the upcoming Hashnode Weekly.
You have no idea whether somebody has understood what you were trying to say.
- To find this out, you have to talk to your listeners/readers.
- Ok, but how do I talk with my listeners? Should I call them on the phone one-by-one? I do not even have their phone number.
- In the comment section, of course. That is the only reason for its existence.
- Ok, but how do I convince my readers to comment on my article?
- As usual, lead by example, but I will tell more about this topic later.
You have no idea what do they think about your message.
- How can you figure out what are they thinking about your mumbling?
- This can be learned with the procedure mentioned above:
You have to ask them.
You have no idea whether your message changed their thought process.
- What about changing their thinking?
Same as above.
You have no idea whether your message affected their actions or not.
- From what can you tell how your mumbling inspired for taking action?
- Just follow your readersso you can easily find out, and of course, ask them in the comment section.
You have no idea whether they are spreading your words or not.
If you want to change the world, it is not enough to be an alone prophet, you need missionaries, who spread your words in the world.
- Yeah, that is true, for sure. My advice is to
follow your readers on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, especially on Twitter as that is where real things happen.
You have no idea whether you had a message at all
- What is the final question which is more crucial than all the others Miki?
- The most crucial question is: What is your message?
- Miki, I don't have a message. Is that a problem?
- I wouldn't call it a problem; it is much more a waste of opportunity.
- Ok, but why?
- Because your readers have read your article, and now they are listening to you, eagerly waiting for what else will you tell.
You should not articulate your message to your readers. Instead of that you should tailor your article to radiate your message.
It works much better if you let the readers figure it out for themselves.
And that was it. We were able to answer almost all of our questions.
- Thanks Miki for the explanation. By now I know much more about my readers/listeners. But how can I active my readers?
- By asking them nicely, to do something. There is a term for this in marketing. It is called:
Call To Action - AKA Miki Szeles's 6 commandments asks for favor
No matter whether you are marketing your product, yourself, or you just shared your knowledge with the community,
You (should) have a message for your readers.
You wrote a high-quality article, put in several hours to research and to register your essay, you post it, but still:
You have no idea whether somebody was on the street around you.
You have no idea whether somebody has heard your words.
You have no idea how long were they listening.
You have no idea whether they were women or men.
You have no idea where the listeners are from.
You have no idea how old are they.
You have no idea whether somebody has understood what you were trying to say.
You have no idea how many readers liked what you were saying or not.
You have no idea what do they think about your message.
You have no idea whether your message changed their thought process.
You have no idea whether your message affected their actions or not.
You have no idea whether they are spreading your words or not.
In order to find this out, you need the Call To Action.
Miki Szeles's 6 commandments asks for favor
Many marketing experts would tell that you should only have one call to action, but I see it differently, but of course, I do not trust in gut feelings, I test everything, as you might already know, my motto is:
Testing is the soul of everything
My first article had 0 calls to action. I am not 100% sure, as I already updated it multiple times.
But during the 1,5 months I have collected six different calls to action, so please let me share them with you to help you find your ones.
Commandment #1 - Share this article
- Hey Miki, I put a lot of effort into my article, I posted it on Hashnode, Dev.to, Medium and Hackernoon, so my followers will see it. And I also shared it on Twitter, LinkedIn and even on Facebook, so all my followers will see it.
- You are wrong.
- Why?
- Social media platforms are living from advertisement.
- And?
- Why would you pay for marketing if all your followers could see all of your messages?
- Umm, to reach also my non-followers?
- Right, but social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook are so poor they have to find and exploit all potential monetisation options.
- Ok, I can understand that. Poor social media platforms. I hope they get enough money to feed their children. Maybe I should start an ad campaign, to make sure that.
- Sad fact: Only 6% of your followers see the content you posted on Facebook.
- Sorry, what?
- Let me repeat this:
Only 6% of your followers see the content you posted on Facebook.
- What the heck?
- Yes, I can understand your feelings. Do you see why it is crucial to have real followers and not artificially grow them by paying a few bucks to get a few thousand random followers?
- Umm, not really.
- Let's suppose you have 100 real followers and 900 followers you got by paying for them. By the way, I am pretty sure that 1/3 of those 900 are robots.
6 per cent of 1000 is 60. That is quite a bad result, but six is even worse.
Only 6 of your real followers will see your article!!!
- Ok, but I do not have money to advertise my article, so what can I do?
- You can hack the system.
- Hacking? How?
- 6% is only an average.
The more reactions and comments are on your article, the more people you will reach.
- Ah, cool, thanks for the in-depth explanation, Miki.
- It was my pleasure, Miki
So, by now, you already know how crucial it is to share the articles of your fellow bloggers even without asking. But to be on the safe side, I kindly ask you to share this article if you find it helpful. ๐
How to measure the performance of your article?
- Managers love KPIs.
- Umm. I don't want to sound stupid, and I know I could Google it, but as I think we are friends, Miki, I ask you: What are KPIs?
- KPI means Key Performance Indicator. KPI is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively you are achieving your key business objectives.
- Ok, so what is the big deal with these KPIs?
- Managers do not just like it, they fetishise them so much they are putting them on a board called a dashboard, so they can sink on their knees and worship these excellent looking KPIs. Look:
- Wow. It looks gorgeous.
- Yeah, I think so. I like the shades of orange and yellow. I have to admit, I can understand why managers are looking at these beautiful masterpieces all day long.
- Mikiii. Do these managers also make KPIs to their employees' happiness?
- I don't think so, but maybe they will at least start to think about it after they read this article.
Joking aside, KPIs are very valuable even for us bloggers. It is so helpful I even come up with my own KPI.
Who knows maybe at some point this number will be included in the Hashnode Analytics. However I know some of the Hashnode team members are usually reading my articles (thanks, Eleftheria Batsou ๐), but to make sure they won't miss it, I have created a feature request. Please upvote it if you find this idea valuable. ๐
So, let's calculate this value for some of my articles:
It had three comments and four reactions.
Here is the calculation:
- Miki! That number is as small I cannot even see without my glasses. We should not show that to the CEO as the whole team will be fired immediately. ๐ฑ
- You do not have glasses, Miki, but you are right about the numbers, let's tweak it a little bit so that the upper management will be happy.
In order to make sure you won't get fired</>reach the full potential of KPIs, you have to compare them to samples taken in the past.
I have decided to use my first article with 200+ views as the baseline.
I will compare the performance of my articles to that. Of course later, whenever I will constantly have 1000 reads per article, I will use a different baseline. ๐
So we have to adapt our calculation by dividing it by 0.0188.
Sht, I *forgot to use the Hashnode Markdown for equations. Let me make it good.
$$
\frac{\frac{numberofreactions}{visitorcount} +3 * \frac{numberofcomments}{visitorcount}}{0.0188}
$$
I needed many iterations to learn the correct syntax and during this, I experienced a bug, which I also saw earlier, but this time it was annoying.
Whenever I switch between the write and preview mode, the view scrolls to a completely different position. Usually, it missis the position by several pages.
Here is the bug report, please upvote it if it also annoys you. ๐
Let's get back to our calculation.
For the first article, it will result in 1 of course, as we are dividing with itself.
That's boring, so let's check 2 of my other articles:
- My First Month on Hashnode - A Retrospection About Blogging on Hashnode Developer Journaling Platform by Miki Szeles:
$$
\frac{\frac{132}{457} +3 * \frac{17}{457}}{0.0188} = 21.3
$$
- Wow, Miki. That is awesome. That is what management would like to see. We might keep our jobs. I am so happy.
- Hold on. Managers are sotille. From now on, they will measure our results using this as a baseline.
- Ahh, you are right. What should we do?
- Obvious, we should never show this article to them.
- Ok, Miki, but we have to come up with something.
- I know exactly what should we do. There was an article that got more than 12k views, but I was so dumb that I did not add any call to action.
Wow. More than 12k readers. That is pretty awesome. Show me the results!
How to Create a Legendary GitHub Profile?: 0.44
Hah. We got it. That looks much better. I hope management will use that as the baseline.
- Yeah, we will show this one to the management, but let's be honest, this result is delusory.
You are right, but it is too late to do something, Miki.
- I still have an idea with which we can improve the situation.
- Really? That would be awesome. What should we do?
- We go back in time and add our six commandments to it.
- That is an exciting idea, but we cannot go back in time, Miki.
- You are right again, Miki. As always, you are more clever than me. So what is what we can still do?
- As this article still has some momentum, we update the article and add the call to action to it.
- Wow. What a fantastic idea.
Dear reader! I will be right back. Just give me some โฐ to update my article.
Up till then, I suggest the same to you. ๐
- Are you back, Miki?
- Yeah, sure.
- Why did it take so long?
- Well, I tried to use Hashnode Widgets to save time.
- Wow. Hashnode Widgets. Can you tell me a few words about it?
- First things first, Miki. I will get back to it.
- Ok, so what was the problem?
- Well the result was utterly messed up. Look:
- Ouch. Have you created a ticket about it?
- Sure. If there is no ticket about something, that thing does not exist. You can find it here. Please upvote it in case you would also like to use Hashnode Widgets.๐
- In the end, I made six commandments.
- Wow, that is awesome. Just five more to go, and we will beat Moses.
- Hey, Miki. Did you know it is not okay to joke about religion in our PC world?
I know, but I do believe religious people also have humour, and I hope they won't get it offensive. But I kindly ask you to let me know, and I will immediately remove this section. ๐
- Ok, so what is commandment #2?
- Before I answer it, let me show you the result:
How to Create a Legendary GitHub Profile?
Commandment #2 - Read my best article!
- What do you mean by this, Miki?
- Your readers have read your article, most probably they enjoyed it as they have read it till the end.
- So what?
- It would be a waste not to grab this opportunity.
- Arrrr. What do you mean? I cannot follow you, Miki. You are mysterious as usual.
Your kind reader liked your article; it is the perfect opportunity to show your best article, an article which is your essence, your story, the one writing you are most proud of.
- Ahh. That makes sense. How do you do that?
Let me show you mine:
My credo: The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red โค Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet
Read my story, in case you would like to understand how I think and act as a developer and tester in the real world. You can get some insights about my humour, and I am also happy to tell you that, this is my article about which I am the proudest of now.
Wow. You are so clever, Miki. You pasted it here. You make sure your readers will check it.
- Yeah, of course, but don't worry, I will paste it to the end of my story too, to be on the safe side. ๐
By the way, I noticed you recently started to use the word AKA. What does it mean?**
- Do you want to hear the answer? It is pretty long.
- Yeah, sure.
- So AKA has many meanings:
- AKA is a language in Sudan and the Central African Republic and also in India(Hruso).
- many people are called AKA, like the South African rapper Aka).
- AKA is a village in Japan, India, Iran, and Hungary. By the way, I had never heard this name before, only Ajka. They might have misspelt it.
I could list many other meanings, but instead of that, just check Wikipedia.
- Thanks Miki for this in-depth explanation, but it does not make any sense. Is there any other meaning of AKA?
Sure, I just wanted to play with you a little bit.
AKA means Also Known As.
- Ahh. Cool. Don't you think you are overusing it, and it will make your readers annoyed?
- I am pretty sure there will be some readers who will stop following me cause of this, but it makes it easy to recognise my articles just by the title.
- Makes sense. But Miki, you should not have written this here. What if other people will also start using it?
- Of course, I also thought about that, but I can quickly adapt so that I can come up with other titles, and in addition to that, I am compositing my images to make a unique cover.
- Yeah, I like them. Especially the one in The Mystery Of The Small But Cute Refrigerator On The 3rd Floor - My First 3 Months At DMG MORI HEITEC Digital Kft.. So do you think this is enough to make you stand out from the thousands of bloggers?
- Of course, I am not sure. But I have two more ways to achieve that.
- Really? Give it to me!
- The Hashnode Weekly by Miki Szeles
- Yeah, that is unique at the moment. It might be even better than the featured section of Hashnode as you write a few sentences teaser for all the articles.
- Yep.
- But what if other people will start making newsletters too?
- That is precisely my goal. I am even developing a Chrome Extension called Hashnode Newsletter Generator to encourage the Hashnode community to come up with their newsletter.
- Yes, that would be awesome to see many, many newsletters.
- I even have a motto.
- Really? What is it?
- Show me your newsletter, and I will tell you who you are.
- Haha. That was funny.
- It is not a joke. I am completely serious.
- Um. Okay. But do not you afraid you will lose your uniqueness when others start to create their newsletter?
- Nope.
- Why?
- Because nobody else can make a Hashnode Weekly by Miki Szeles newsletter.
- Fair enough.
- You said you have one more thing which makes you unique. Can you tell me what it is?
- Of course. I am writing long articles. Very looong reports with 15+ minutes reading time.
Ok, I have to admit, that is not usual nowadays when people get distracted every minute.
Miki! I think we should ask one thing from the Hashnode team.
- Really? What is it?
- Is it possible to write multi-level lists in Hashnode markdown language?
- Great questions.
- Let's ask it together. Are you ready?
- Yepp. 3..2..1.. Go!
- Dear Hashnode Team, is it possible to create multi-level lists in a Hashnode post?
- Thanks in advance.
- There is a problem, Miki.
- What is your problem again, Miki? I am getting tired of you.
- As I earlier said, if there is no ticket about something, then that never happened.
- Ok, but is it a bug, or is it a feature?
- It is a bug, of course. It is always a bug.
- Can you elaborate on this?
- Just wait a few days, and you can get an in-depth explanation in my upcoming story:
QA Vs Dev AKA Bug Vs Feature AKA A Never Ending Debate AKA The 7+1 Testing Principles Explained By Miki Szeles.
- Hmm, that sounds interesting. But how the hell could you push so many topics into one article? I am pretty sure your readers will get tired after a few paragraphs.
- Well, I remember the time when I had to prepare for the ISTQB CTFL exam, and I had a tough time memorizing the seven testing principles.
- Yeah, me too. It has su*ked.
- Yeah, and as I am such a nice guy I mentioned one more principle completely free.
- Wow. What an excellent marketing trick. This always works. People like free stuff. They never realise if something is free, then you are the product with which you pay for the free stuff.
- Ahh. I did not know that. Thanks for sharing.
- Ok, so testers will read your article, but what about developers?
- Hehe. I also thought about them.
- So what did you do to keep their attention?
- Well I brought a never-ending debate on the Bug vs Feature to make sure they will stay with me. I even did some detective work again, similarly to what I did in The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red โค Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet.
- Do you think is that enough?
- Well I came up with a solution to the problem. And again, it is entirely free. They are lucky, as in the case I have proposed this solution as a consultant, I would have asked for a hell a lot of money.
- Clever Miki. Very clever.
- One last question Miki: Do you think this was enough promo for our upcoming story?
- Yeah, I think so, but to make sure they will read it, I brought a teaser from it:
- Wow, Miki. This is cool. I also want to read it.
Calm down, Miki. Just a few days and everybody can read it.
Focus Miki. Focus. You have written 5616 words, and you have told almost nothing about Hashnode Widgets.
Yeah, you are right, just wait a little bit we will get there after one more thousand words.
So I went to the Hashnode feature request page, and I wanted to ask the question.
- And? This sounds easy-peasy.
- Well, I only had two choices. Feature request and bug.
- So what?
- It would be awesome to have a third option: Question.
- Ok, where is the feature request ticket, Miki? I got to know you by now, so I am sure you have already created it.
- Haha. Here it is.
- Miki, do you think we should ask our readers again to upvote this? Won't it get annoying?
- Yeah, it is very annoying, but still, that is the best option we can do.
- Are you sure? I think there is one more option to emphasise the importance of a feature request.
- Really? What is it?
- I have a universal answer to that: 42.
- Will it answers the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything?
- Yeah, that is precisely what it answers.
- Can you give a little bit more clear answer?
- Ok, my answer, which is as universal as 42 is:
Write an article about it.
Associating and then associating and then again associating, then it gets back to the original idea again.
Anyway, you are right. Let's see commandment #3.
Commandment #3 - Contribute to the Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome! Extension open-source project.
Here it is:
Contribute to the open-source Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome Extension, with which test automation teams can save hours daily by automatically generating all the relevant selectors for Selenide, Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Squish and TestCafe.
- Do you agree, this section is self-explaining?
- Yeah. We can see commandment #4
Commandment #4 - Follow the Selenideium Element Inspector Twitter channel!
Follow the Selenideium Element Inspector Twitter channel to get updated on the latest happenings regarding Selenideium, to get help, to share your experience and also to talk about any (test automation) related topic! ๐
- That is interesting.
- Yeah. As you might know, I got addicted to not just Hashnode but to Twitter too.
- Really? Why?
- Because it is such a vibrant community. You can hear about the most recent news, there are many many fun posts, and who the hell knows what else. It even radically improved my writing.
- Really? How?
- Haha. I won't tell.
At least not now.
But in a few weeks, I will post an article with the title:
How 2 Months Of Tweeting Radically Improved The Quality Of My Writing.
But you know what?
- What?
- I just opened daily. dev to find the link to my article, and I discovered a pretty cool feature.
- What is it? Show it to me!
- You can generate your own dev card. Here it is:
- Wow, Miki. This is an excellent feature. By the way, you look gorgeous.
- No, I am not just looking at my hair. I will be 40 in a month, and my hair is entirely grey.
To be honest my hair started greying 15 years ago.
- Ah. Do you know the reason? What has happened at that time?
I do not know the exact cause, but that was when I started working, but also when we got together with my ex-girlfriend.
- Wait, what? I thought she became your wife.
Yes. That is precisely she is my ex-girlfriend.
Miki let's get back to the Selenideium Element Inspector Twitter Channel!
- Sure. So let me tell you why I have created it.
- Ok.
- So, I created it to connect and grow the Selenideium Element Community, so they can get help, exchange thoughts and contribute to this open-source project.
- I think that is enough about the Selenideium Element Inspector Twitter channel.
- Yeah. Just one last thing. I wrote an article about it from which you can get more info:
Breaking News! Selenideium Element Inspector is Available Both on testdev. Tools and Twitter.
- Why I am not surprised you wrote an article about it? But anyway I started to think.
- Thinking about what?
- To create my own Twitter account.
- What???? We already have a Twitter account.
- Yeah, but that's yours. I want my one.
No comment.
Go on, Miki, just two more commandments, and we are ready. I suggest making it short not to lose our last reader too.
- Ok, I will do that. Except if not.
Commandement #5 - Join The Selenide User Group!
Join the Selenide User Group on LinkedIn to connect with more than a hundred test automation engineers and learn and get help regarding the coolest e2e test automation framework: Selenide.
When I started using Selenide, an end-to-end test automation framework based on Selenium Webdriver, I immediately fell in love.
I fell in love with it as it is superior to Selenium as it is built on top of it, so it has the same functionality and much more:
- No more StaleElementReferenceException (in 95% of the cases, to be exact ๐).
- Easier syntax
- Advanced selectors
- Built-in profiler
And much more.
Read more about it in my very first article:
Selecting an End to End Testing Framework - Selenium or Selenide?
Publishing that article was the first step I made on the beautiful writing journey.
At that time I did not know about Hashnode, so I posted it on LinkedIn.
I have noticed something. A guy called Andrei Solnstev liked my article, who is the developer of Selenide.
You cannot imagine how proud I was.
As there are many test automation-related groups on LinkedIn, I looked for a Selenide group, but I realised there is no such group.
So I took the courage and wrote a DM to Andrei in which I explained my idea.
Luckily, he liked it, so the next day, the Selenide User Group was born.
- Ok, Miki. Thanks, let's move on to the next commandment. Hurry. Hurry.
- Sure.
Commandment #6 - Join the Selenideium Element Inspector Bounty Hunting Reward Program and earn โs by contributing to this open-source project. ๐
Join the Selenideium Element Inspector Bounty Hunting Reward Program and earn โs by contributing to this open-source project. ๐
This is the perfect opportunity to make the first step into open-source contributing and if you would like to learn about JavaScript and Chrome extension development. ๐
You can expect an amicable, helpful community, and you can even earn โs.
I will even give a shoutout to you both on Selenideium and my personal Twitter account in case you contribute.
What are you waiting for?
Check out Breaking News! Selenideium Element Inspector Bounty Hunting Reward Program Is Here โ for more details! ๐
In this article, he mentioned Hashnode widgets. As he is usually telling intelligent things, I had a look at it, and I immediately realised how awesome Hashnode Widgets are.
- What caught you in Hashnode Widgets?
- Her eyes, of course, and her face too.
- Come on, Miki. Tell me the truth.
- Ok. I immediately saw the infinite potential in it.
- Can you elaborate on this?
- Sure. During the last 1,5 months, I have posted many many articles. During this time, my call to action list and text changed continuously as I read, learnt, thought about it, and also because I started to incorporate in new things like blogging on other platforms too.
So, cause of this, I always had to go back and edit all my previous articles.
This was easy in the beginning.
- What happened then?
I started to post daily, so I have published 40 articles(including this one).
- By the way, can you tell our readers, how old are you?
- I am closer to 30 than to 25.
- Really? I did not think you were such young. How old are you exactly?
- 40.
- What a coincidence, that is exactly how many articles you have written. It cannot be by accident.
- Stop right here. I do not believe in numerology.
That is very stupidwise.
So , what the problem with your daily posts was?
- As I continuously changed my call to action list, I always edited all my previous articles. Can you calculate what does it mean?
- No. I am not good at math.
- Well, that means exponential growing which means
complexity.
- Sorry, but I do not get this mumbo jumbo.
- It means that I have to spend a hell of a lot of time updating my article!
- Ok. I got it. You do not have to be rude.
- You are right, sorry, but I cannot bear slow-minded people.
- Really? I thought you enjoy helping others and explaining everything in a digestible way.
That's true. It looks like I am a better person than I thought.
Let's continue. Was there a disturbance in this short period of your relationship?
- Sure. Right at the beginning.
- Wow. What happened?
- I have created a perfect call to action list, and she messed up everything. In a minute, the whole list looked like an ugly dollop.
- Well, that is not nice. How did you deal with it?
- I kindly asked her to do that again.
- Did it help?
I do not know; we are not talking since then.
Are you planning to have children?
- Well I already have one from my previous relationship. His name is Selenideium Element Inspector, but we are working on the project.
- Have you already decided what they will be called?
- Yes, their name will be Hashnode Newsletter Generator.
- Wow. What a lovely name.
Yes, I think so.
Miki, we are running out of time, do you have any last message for our readers.
- Sure.
Just to teach something in this helpful article:
The word mumble is called motyogรกs in Hungarian. ๐
- Miki, thanks for the interview. It was a pleasure to meet you.
- Thanks to you too.
Just one last question.
- Yes?
- When will the interview be published?
- In a few hours, right after our designers are ready with the cover image, and right after, our painters highlight the primary information in this article. We have to hurry to make it into the Hashnode Daily Top10.
- Well, the painting won't take too long.
- You are right, Miki. You are right.
- Is that all?
- Umm. Not really. I have to admit we have a slight bottleneck here.
We have just employed an expert to raise the quality of our writing to a new level.
- Phew. Is it someone I know? What is her name?
- Her name is Grammarly Premium.
- I know her, at least her son Grammarly. We are great friends. I have learnt a lot from him. So what is the expert's opinion about this article?
- Well, she gave the advice to correct all our spelling mistakes, so we already did that.
- What is the problem then? The primary purpose of Grammarly is to correct your spelling mistakes.
- You are correct if we talk about Grammarly Premium's son, the little Grammarly, but his mother is much pickier.
- How much more?
- Guess how many corrections she suggested!
- 10?
- Upper!
- 50?
- Nope, go further.
- 100???
- You are not even close!
- Don't play on my nerves. How many corrections did she suggest?
- 415!!!
- No way. 415? That is crazy.
- Indeed.
- Will you correct all of them blindly?
- Of course not, as we also have our original experts, and we value their opinion.
I also heard that Grammarly Premium sometimes could be too official, which is not exactly what we want.
- Ok. then I wish you good luck; I guess you already lost the hope to be in the Top10 today, but maybe tomorrow.
- We will see Miki. We will see.
Thanks for the interview again. I am not used to such long discussions, but I enjoyed every minute.
- Thanks too, Miki, the pleasure is mine.
Thanks for reading James, Mary, ่ฅๆฑ, ๆฒๅฎธ and everyone else. ๐
What is your call-to-action list? Share it in the comments section!
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My credo: The Mystery Of The Supposedly Red โค Emoji AKA The Story Of How I Became A Software Developer Detective To Debug The Internet
Read my story, in case you would like to understand how I think and act as a developer and tester in the real world. You can get some insights about my humour, and I am also happy to tell you that, this is my article about which I am the proudest of now.
In case you do not want to miss my posts, just follow me here on Hashnode, on LinkedIn, on Twitter on Medium.com, on dev.to, on Hackernoon and even on Instagram. ๐
Contribute to the open-source Selenideium Element Inspector Chrome Extension, with which test automation teams can save hours daily by automatically generating all the relevant selectors for Selenide, Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Squish and TestCafe.
Follow the Selenideium Element Inspector Twitter channel to get updated on the latest happenings regarding Selenideium, to get help, to share your experience and also to talk about any (test automation) related topic! ๐
Join the Selenide User Group on LinkedIn to connect with more than a hundred test automation engineers and learn and get help regarding the coolest e2e test automation framework: Selenide.
Join the Selenideium Element Inspector Bounty Hunting Reward Program and earn โs by contributing to this open-source project. ๐
This is the perfect opportunity to make the first step into open-source contributing, and also in case you would like to learn about JavaScript and Chrome extension development. ๐
You can expect a friendly, helpful community, and you can even earn โs.
I will even give a shoutout to you both on Selenideium and my personal Twitter accounts in case you contribute.
What are you waiting for?
Check out Breaking News! Selenideium Element Inspector Bounty Hunting Reward Program Is Here โ for more details! ๐
