Learning From Blogging
I want to cover this point first, as honestly, it’s one of the most significant benefits I believe you can achieve from blogging.
It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that you’ll learn from writing a blog post. Surely you have to already know about the topic before you can write about it? 100% not true in my experience. (View Highlight)
1 – I have just solved a particular problem at work or perhaps in a personal project which I want to document and share by posting about it. (View Highlight)
This first category covers many cases where I’ve already done a lot of learning to solve the problem in the first place. I’ve found through personal experience that by immediately blogging about the issue and my solution I push at the edges of what I learned.
Sure I’ve solved the problem, but do I really understand why my solution worked? Often as deeply as I may presume. The act of writing about a subject and explaining it to others encourages me to go a little deeper. This is an excellent motivator for my own continuous learning. I try to think about the questions I’d ask if I were reading the blog post. What is fuzzy or unexplained entirely? At this point, I’m often seeking and reading more information to answer that question.
Deciding how deep you should go can be tough. You could write infinitely if you tried to explain everything. While researching content I often learn more than I end up including in the post. I still benefit from the additional knowledge I gain. Filtering content down to the most crucial things that I believe people want and need to know also helps me to retain the essential knowledge.
The second benefit of blogging, for our own learning, is retention. When we solve a new problem or learn about a topic, it’s easy to forget that information quite soon after. Writing it down helps store the information into your long-term memory. Explaining it embeds it even further. I struggle with a quite lousy memory, and I find writing blog posts helps me with my retention. (View Highlight)
These tend to and up as deep-dive technical posts which I quite enjoy writing because I learn so much in the process. They often take longer to produce. I my end up reading through the ASP.NET or .NET Core source code, documentation and from as many other sources of information as possible.
These types of post motivate me and give me an extra reason to dedicate some time to the necessary research. Without the blog post as a carrot (me being the donkey), I’d likely put off a lot of the study until I think I need it. This encourages continuous learning and exposes me to more topics, many of which will be more useful to me than I immediately realise. (View Highlight)
In our day-to-day work, we are often bombarded with tasks and things we need to get done. Some of you may already feel overloaded and be struggling to keep up. Making time for personal growth and learning can be really tough. (View Highlight)
For me personally, the craft of writing software and working with technology is a passion. I also enjoy the process of learning and understanding things. Writing posts encourages me to carve out some personal time during lunch, or during my commute to write posts. Whenever I get an idea for something, I note the title and a brief description of the concept. Many of these fail to see the light of day, but a lucky few do make it. (View Highlight)
The process of blogging helps me to articulate the things which I’ve learned. Explaining a subject to others is a skill you can translate to your work too. Perhaps you need to explain why something is wrong during a code review. Maybe you need to present a technical topic during a meeting or you are updating the company wiki. In all cases, that requires communication skills which you can develop (under less pressure than at work) by blogging. (View Highlight)
The ability to research is also an important skill you will develop as you write blog posts. Finding resources, verifying their accuracy, comparing them to your own knowledge and preconceptions are abilities that you can also apply to your work. (View Highlight)
Lift Your Career and Expand Your Horizons (View Highlight)
From a career perspective, a blog can really help you stand out from the crowd. Employers can see that you have a body of work and experience. It shows dedication and a passion for your craft. It helps highlight you as someone who will move a project forward with an eye for making things better. It demonstrates your experience and knowledge far better than any CV (résumé). (View Highlight)
The short summary of everything above is – start a blog. That’s it! Don’t overthink it. Try it for a few months and see how you get on. Learn and adapt as you go. It’s been one of the best things I’ve done to help my career and to become one small part of the fantastic .NET community. Let me know if you get started with a blog after reading this! (View Highlight)