We’ve all been there: you just learnt something cool, or got around a really tricky problem in your code, and now you want to share this information with the rest of the world. But then you start questioning yourself…
Why would anyone ever want to read it?
Is it even useful?
I’m just bad at writing
Yes, all of those things may be true (or maybe not), but I’m here to tell you that you should write that blog post anyways. I’ve had a modest experience writing blogs on various technical (and some non-technical) topics on my website, and other websites as well. Even now, I always hesitate before writing my next post, fearing that nothing will come of it. But this could not be further from the truth. The time and effort involved in writing a blog is heavily outweighed by its benefits.
Self documentation 📘
When you write about something, you are explaining your understanding of it to the public. Out of all the people who read your blog, no one will understand it better than you. Our memory is not perfect, and over time, we forget things. You may have been an expert in Java thread concurrency on one day, but forgotten it completely the next. Reading you own tutorials and blogs is better than anything else out there, because it’s literally you explaining things to yourself from the future.
I wrote a blog on how to make a telegram bot a while back, and to this day, it’s my go to resource when I want to get started building another bot.
You can think of your blog the same way you think of taking notes in college, except this time, everyone else can also see your notes… which brings me to my next point:
It helps others 👯♀️
Yes, it really does. If you think about it, even if 10 people read your blog post in a year, you have still helped 10 more people than you would have if you hadn’t written it. Your explanation may have made someone understand a topic that they were struggling with, or helped someone solve a problem they had no idea anybody else shared.
And no, you don’t have to be an expert on the topic either. On the contrary, the best blogs for beginners, are blogs written by other beginners, since a lot of the problems novices face with new concepts and technologies are seldom understood by experts. I would go so far as to say the best time to write about something is just after you feel you have understood it.
It gets better 📈
If you’ve never written before, you may feel that your articulation skills are not up to par. This is in fact, all the more reason that you should write, since in my experience, the best way to get better at writing is to write. Your first few posts may be clumsy, as were mine, but it does get better the more you write. The important thing is to re-read your older posts and take note of the areas you felt could be improved. This process is made exponentially better if you get others to read your post and give you constructive feedback.
In any case, on average, your next post will always be kind-of sort-of better than your previous one. Each post evolves from the last, getting slightly better along the way.
It’s fun
This should actually be the only reason on this list.
At then end of the day, it feels really good to see someone read and comment on a post you’ve written. It feels good to look over something you’ve written in the past and use it as your own reference. It feels good to see how you’re slowly but surely able to write something better than you wrote yesterday. And it’s ultimately these feelings that motivate me to write more, even though what I write may not be the best.
I hope this blog post gives you enough reason to go and publish a piece of your brain as well.
What are you still doing here? Go and write something!
