A year of blogging: why blog

This year I decided to really challenge myself. I’m going to write one post per week for a whole year. Moreover, I think you should do it too. And here are 6 reasons why.

1. Sharing experience

We’ve all been there: reading a blog post explaining exactly what we needed to do in order to solve some technical problem. For example, when I started working with Jackson, I had tons of questions “how to do this, how to do that” and this blog was just invaluable for me.

However, we tend to forget that somebody took the time and organized their pain and hours they had spent in frustration trying to figure out the same thing in the form of these lovely articles. Also let’s face it: your situation isn’t unique. If you have troubles making something to work, somebody else totally has troubles with it too. So take the chance and organize your pain in the form of a blog post as well.

If you’re new to coding and truly believe that your problems are not interesting to anyone, I can assure you that your experience as novice programmer is interesting at least for people like me who build tools for learning. Not to mention inspirational value for those afraid to embark on this journey themselves.

2. Building personal brand

Which personal trainer will you choose: the one that has a blog describing their views and their clients’ success stories or the one that doesn’t? Well, it’s not very different in software engineering either. If a candidate has a blog updated regularly it at least means that they have the discipline to do it. It’s a total plus, don’t you think? If there are meaningful posts related to the technology they are supposed to work with, it’s simply a dream.

Many people use blogging to build their personal brand: solve their products, consulting services or establishing their expertise. Why not try it yourself?

3. Improving your writing in a foreign language

English is not my native language. However, all the resources I use to improve my skills are in English. All the main conferences for developers are in English. I use English all the time at work and mostly in writing: creating documentation for my code or writing internal documents for my team.

I’m quite fluent in English, but I’m far from perfect and sometimes it’s really hard to switch from Russian and to formulate my thoughts in a foreign language.

Deliberate practice can help you to improve anything. Let’s see if my English writing becomes better in 52 weeks!

4. Better understanding

When I was at University, my boyfriend and I were able to prepare for an exam in just three days. We even have a stupid achievement: we learned 84 calculus questions in just one day and both got 5 out of 5.

How did we do that? We sat together and explained things to each other, asked each other questions when something wasn’t clear.

I’m absolutely sure that explaining things to another person is the best way to understand and learn. In writing in order to form a coherent text you need to understand the logic behind things really well.

5. Better time management

If you need to publish at least one post a week, you need to find time to write it every week. You can’t make time out of nothing, so you need to better manage your tasks, time and energy. As a bonus, when you complete such a hard challenge, you start believing in yourself more. And who knows to what great accomplishments it will eventually lead.

6. Learning from community

Blogging is also about building your audience. If those people are interested in your content, they must have similar views, problems or whatsoever. So congratulations, you’ve received a gift of having your own supporting community ready to offer you advice (usually good).

Let’s not forget that everybody just loves telling other people on the Internet when they’re wrong. So if you really are wrong, it’s extremely valuable for you when there is someone to tell you about it.

Bonus You can become an internet celebrity :)

Next week I’m going to publish a post about debugging techniques.