5 Up-and-coming Community Tech Blogs

by Alex Ellis

I started this blog over 24 months ago as a way to record the technology I was learning as I started to transition my focus to open source software. During that time I've covered a mix of software and hardware - Raspberry Pi, Docker, Robots, Node.js, Golang and came full circle to write about Windows Containers and .NET. I also joined the Docker Captains program which opened up opportunities to speak at conferences, meet-up groups and to give workshops.

By writing regularly and by being active in the open source and maker scene a small community has formed around this blog and I wanted to highlight five people here.

What is a blog community?

I'll blur the lines here between the reach of this blog, time at meet-ups, conferences and on Twitter all count towards building community but here are some specifics:

  • a steady flow of regular, returning readers
  • people who give feedback on what is and isn't working
  • who use your content to make their own cool stuff
  • broken links or errors in code examples or typos
  • people who collaborate on related open-source projects
  • people who have been inspired to go on and write their own projects or Ghost blog with Docker

Let's look at five people I wanted to highlight. There are more, but I wanted to start here and note there is not a particular order.

Mario Cruz - Miami, USA

I met Mario on the Docker Community Slack channel. We shared a common interest in the Raspberry Pi and Docker so had lots to talk about. He is a talented maker and has come up with some very creative projects using a laser cutter at his local "makerspace".

Here's Mario's latest blog post from our collaboration for Dockercon Austin:

Finnian Anderson - UK

Finnian reached out over Twitter after teaching himself Docker Swarm with my Docker tutorials and videos. He had built an impressive tower of Raspberry Pis and was starting to develop some very neat IoT hack.

We were able to meet up at Dockercon Austin this year where Finnian was a TA (Teaching Assistant) in a Raspberry Pi and Docker workshop I ran for 60 people.

Finnian has gone on to write many more blog posts around Docker and Serverless functions - you can read more at Finnian.io/blog.

Sylvain Deauré - France

Sylvain is a Raspberry Pi and Docker hacker who has made some very cool IoT projects with Minecraft and Pimoroni products. He also runs a business around SEO and blogs in French and English.

We met when Sylvain asked to translate one of my blog posts to French. It's about Functions as a Service and you can read it here in French.

He also helped some work I was doing to port a Python hardware library over to Go and wrote about it here:

Richard Gee - UK

Richard has a great eye for detail and we met when he started contributing to my Golang library for the Pimoroni Blinkt LED stick.

One of the coolest projects we collaborated on was for Live Streaming to YouTube from a 5 dollar Raspberry Pi Zero. It even got featured on the Official Raspberry Pi blog which was awesome!

We also had a chance to meet up at the Fusion meetup group in Birmingham last month.

He has given me great advice and feedback on blogs and code projects as well as helping answer questions on Twitter and in Slack.

http://blog.technologee.co.uk/

Johnny Mkhael - France

I met Johnny in Austin at Dockercon while I was deeply engrossed in setting up a Raspberry Pi and Docker timelapse with Mario. He'd been a regular reader of my blog and I asked if we could catch up later - I'm glad that we did.

Since then Johnny's built out a blog running on his Raspberry Pi by following my Ghost blog series and featured my Functions as a Service project and most recently made a very cool function using TensorFlow to classify photos.

Ruan Bekker - South Africa

There are actually six blogs listed now rather than five because I also wanted to give Ruan a mention.

Ruan is one the latest people to get in touch. He's also started running a Ghost blog on his Raspberry Pi - but the impressive part is that he built out a whole cluster with a networked filesystem running on Docker Swarm.

He was getting a low request per second rate and I suggested he try introducing an NGinx cache which means he can now deal with some serious traffic.

Over to you!

Start writing your own blog

I have been inspired by the five people highlighted in this post. If you think you'd like to start blogging - Docker and Ghost can make that really easy. The initial costs are low because you can run it on a cheap VPS or even from home on a Raspberry Pi.

Join my RPi / Docker / Serverless hackers slack group

If you're interested in the Raspberry Pi, Docker or learning more about Functions as a Service (Serverless for Docker) or have been inspired to get involved in some other way please reach out to me for a Slack invite. There are over 50 of us now so this is a great place to share your latest hacks, write-ups and projects.

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Get more Docker in your life

Here's 3 ways:

  1. You can learn Docker through my tutorial series and videos

  2. Join the Docker Community Slack channel

  3. And subscribe to the Docker weekly email which is full of community blog posts