People and Blogs: Rachel Smith

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I'm Rach, a 37 year old from Australia. I'm a mum to two little ones and I work as a developer at CodePen.

I always loved computers as a kid and the internet as a teen, but I struggled to find a place for me until I discovered front-end development as a profession in 2011.

I spent the first half of my career working in digital advertising, allowing me to live abroad working for agencies in the UK and USA, and the second half working on a single product (CodePen). Working for CodePen has allowed me to expand my skills far beyond the front end, and now I do a bit of everything.)

What's the story behind your blog?

This is actually somewhere around the seventh attempt at keeping a blog. I had two LiveJournals and a Blogspot as a teen. Since I started my career as a developer I've had maybe three different self-hosted blogs, that I tore down and started again, as well as a now-defunct CodePen blog that had code-tutorial style posts. This iteration is the one that has stuck the longest. )

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Something that has been really helpful with my blog was actually to stop thinking about it in terms of a "blog", and more of a "digital garden". I can default to perfectionistic thinking if I'm not careful, and I used to treat blog posts like a finished piece that needed to be polished until it was just right before publishing. By changing my "blog posts" to "notes", it changes the way I think about writing them and gets me to publish far more often.

I do all of my writing in an Obsidian vault. It keeps my personal notes as well as the published ones. When I want to publish a note I run a script that copies the note content to the directory holding my website's content.)

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Before having kids, I could be quite precious about needing a specific environment to get any work done. Now, it is certainly nice to be able to write in a peaceful setting, but I'm also able to do it from anywhere - on the phone in my car, at the kitchen bench with Paw Patrol playing in the background.

One thing I will say is by far the biggest environmental factor that influences my creativity is how much I am on my phone. If I'm on my phone consuming all the time, there is no space for having thoughts about what to write. If I put the phone away, the ideas arrive.)

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I write all my posts in Markdown and use Astro to publish them on the web. All the content is kept in a GitHub repository with the site's code. The site is hosted for free with Netlify. )

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

If I were to do it all again, I think I would make an effort to save more of the old posts I had on previous versions of this blog. I'm like the opposite of a hoarder - I think nothing of tossing things away as I love the idea of a fresh start. But sometimes I think it would be nice to go back and read what I wrote 10 years ago. )

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

All I have to pay for in the running of my blog is the analytics (Plausible) and the domain registration.

I've had a couple of ad networks offer to place ads on my blog but I've always turned them down. My audience is quite small, but very engaged and loyal. Annoying my regular readers wouldn't be worth the small amount income I'd make from an attempt at monetisation. )

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I love reading blogs via RSS and am subscribed to about 30 personal blog feeds, including many of the people you've featured in this series already, so it is hard to choose favourites. I intend to add a blogroll to my site soon.

Speaking of blogrolls, I would suggest you interview Stefan Judis. His website is goals.)

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

If you desire to write on your own blog but something is holding you back I would say: don't make assumptions about what people will or won't find interesting or useful. Every time I think I'm sharing something "too niche" I am surprised at the interest from readers.