Writing as I Learn Revisited

Something New to Learn

It has been a while that I have had a real passion about something new to write about it. When I wrote posts for this blog during my affiliate marketing/easy automated Google ranking days, I got traffic. When I wrote about code, not that much. But I still wrote about code every once and a while. But I also now have to actually to work for a living.

It took finding a stash of ECR-20 tokens to be excited about learning something new. I mean, I like writing code, but I get more excited about what it can do. I learned to write code to have the tools instantly available to create my ideas. It’s bringing the ideas alive that’s the fuel. The code is just a tool. Something I will always continue learning, only to make my road to my goal less bumpy.

##The Best Time to Teach Other Newbies Is When You’re One

Well, I did write a post in a similar vein about a decade ago, but then I realized the limitations of this Jekyll blog. So i didn’t find it and I’m not changing the title in this post because that’s another place where Jekyll is a hassle. But it is the best time to write so that other people can follow in your footsteps, because once you know what you are doing, you’ll be talking jargon that you’ll first have to define to someone who is totally clueless. If you start writing before you need a translator, it’s much easier to pass that information to people who are only a little less clueless than you are.

I look back at some of my posts and cringe at my ignorance, but i still stand by what I just wrote. Both of the books I wrote for Packt were on topics I only had a passing knowledge of when I wrote the outline and signed the contract, but when I was done, I was an expert on the topics and got consulting jobs.

Steemit

So on some random Reddit around a year ago, I found about Steemit. I have always wanted to find a way to make a little more money writing. I want to shift to writing as I get older, so that maybe sometime in my 50’s it will be enough to support me. Then I’ll just write because I enjoy it until I die. No need to retire. The work I did on the Packt books came to about $4 an hour, but I didn’t do that for the money.

So that thread on Steemit said it was a blogging platform that paid. So I gave it a shot. I made about $300 in STEEM, but I couldn’t find a way to exchange it at the time and I picked up a side job, so that blog has been sitting dormant for a while. I tried writing a few posts and I realized that I didn’t have much to write about on the topics that really made money there. And again, I didn’t know how to turn STEEM into money. I knew a handful of programming languages and had written machine learning and genetic algorithms, but cryptocurrency confused the hell out of me.

But necessity is the mother of learning. Add a couple of zeroes to that balance and then it becomes the most interesting thing in the world. It turns out from little machine learning stock market contest called Numerai I had entered, again from a post on a random Reddit, I had earned numeraire ECR-20 tokens out of the blue. I hadn’t logged in since the first three contests where I placed in the top 10 and won cash. They switched to only Bitcoin on the 4th tournament and again like I said, “Ok, confusing, don’t get it, risky, is it real” kicked in and I was out. So just randomly I was checking links here and clicked on the link to Numerai and logged it. “Oh, tokens. Isn’t that cute. That’s even more confusing than Bitcoin”. So I searched for prices on exchanges, then quickly changed my password on Numerai to something with 16 digits, so I could digest everything I could find on cryptocurrency.

So I will continue that story on my Steemit blog and here somewhat. Because cryptocurrency is one of the topics that pays on a platform that is built on cryptocurrency.

But there will still topics to write here on writing, code and other stuff I am doing because they don’t make money when you write about them, but at least they make it look like I wasn’t like, “Hey, my first post this year… and I’m out.”