Early 2023 Rob Blaauboer published his 150th blog for Yenlo. A major milestone! For that reason, we sat down with Rob to hear why he enjoys blogging so much.
What’s been the driving force behind your writing?
Blogging for me is something that I’ve been doing for many years, not only for Yenlo. I am inquisitive by nature and really love to figure out why things are happening or working as they are.
Blogging is also a way of gathering my thoughts and it is a natural part of my work as head of training services here at Yenlo. A blog I have written can be turned into a lab that we use in our training, albeit of course a lab is more elaborate than a blog would be.
It also can be the other way around when a lab that I’ve created gets turned into a blog because I believe that the value is so great we would like to share it with a larger audience.
People sometimes ask me where do I get the ideas from for all my blogs. In a lot of cases it can be something that arises from a question that we receive in training: “is it possible that…”. If the problem is more or less generic, so not specifically pointing at I would say a niche configuration, then it can become a blog with the solution to it.
Another benefit of blogging is of course that it’s cements the knowledge in a very good way. The process of writing down, making screenshots and making it into something that is coherent and worth reading is a great way to let that knowledge sink in.
What are your favorite topics to blog about?
I don’t have a particular favorite topic to blog about but in general I do not shy away from stuff that I haven’t seen before or heard about before. It gives me great pleasure to take something that was previously unknown to me and create something that makes it understandable for a large audience.
It’s not that I only write about WSO2, it’s also tools and products that we use together with WSO2 that I can write about. For instance, blog #150 where I take Mocklab and use it in conjunction with the Micro Integrator to show the functionality. Sometimes the blogs will have a strong relationship to WSO2 but in some cases a little bit more detached.