Why you should write a blog as a developer
Writing a blog is a popular hobby and you can even get your living from it. There are no rules about how a blog should be written or should look like so it is very easy to pick as a hobby.
“You should start to write a blog”, I have heard this sentence from many people and usually there has been a pretty similar list of reasons which are:
- You can get recognized by other developers and build your name
- If you have ever thought that you would like to start your own business or work as a freelancer. You might be able to get your future customers to come read your blog
- It’s fun, they said (and it actually is!)
And every one of them is true. But the most important thing that I have figured out and is usually missing from those lists is the fact that you can use the blog to enhance learning new skills or improve old ones. And that I’m going to go through in this post.
How to exactly utilize the blog to improve your learning You might ask? Well, it is rather simple. The key is that you need to have some interest in the subject for each blog post in the first place. Without that, there is a little chance that the blog post will be interesting to read for others and you get it ever actually published. So let’s start by listing the topics that you are interested in and eager to learn more about.
I list a couple of examples here which are actually something that I’ll be eventually writing of:
- Functional programming
- Clojure
- CI/CD pipelines and automation in general
- Testing
These are some of the topics that I would like to improve in and also willing to write a blog or two. The key thing in this phase is to keep the topics of interests and topics/titles of blog posts separate since they can be totally different in the end. For example, you can write multiple blog posts from Clojure since it is a functional language, interesting, and still quite rarely used. So we don’t want to scope the topic too specific yet. 😁
Now you have a list of topics you want to learn and write from. The next part is to schedule them so as to start to order the topics the way you think is the most suitable for you to learn. It would be preferable if you could set deadlines or time frames when you will learn the thing and write the blog post. I wouldn’t suggest that you set mandatorily very strict deadlines like the end of 11.10.2020 but more like the end of week 41(Yes, this was my deadline for this post so I’m a little late😅). This will ease the stress and the writing will be more pleasant since it doesn’t feel like you must do it.
But yeah, back to the topic, why this helps you with your learning? When you learn new things, you usually scratch only the surface of the topic, and when you try to teach the thing to someone else you really start to understand the thing. In this case, the teaching part is to write a blog post. When you write the blog post it is not enough that you know the subject, it requires that you understand it, and when you are writing you are processing the thing/topic that you have learned. To write it out the way that anyone could understand the thing by reading your post is the key to master the skill.
This was a short post explaining why you should start a blog especially if you are Software Developer. If you inspired to start a blog or already have one don’t hesitate to post it to the comment section below so I can give it a look😁
