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John Au-Yeung
John Au-Yeung

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Why Should Developers Blog?

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Blogging is a way to write down what we know to the web and share it with others.

In this article, we’ll look at why developers should keep a blog.

Get a Deeper Understanding of Topics by Writing

We can get a deeper understanding of what we’re writing about by doing research.

Therefore, blogging is a great way to let us research and record what we learned.

Developer topics are often read by readers whenever they need help so we can offer them help by writing about the topics we want to know more about and then sharing the knowledge with people via a blog.

Become a Better Developer

From the knowledge that we gained from writing all those entries, we’ll get a better understanding of the topics we write about and become a better developer by applying the topics that we write about.

Blogging will let us explore more topics by looking at them more deeply and looking at things in ways that we didn’t in ways that we don’t during our work by researching and writing about new things.

We learn about both soft and technical topics by doing the research and applying the things we find for work and writing about them.

If we know enough to teach something, then we know that we understand them enough to use them ourselves and help people.

Meet New People

Blogging will make our presence public online. Therefore, people will find us eventually online, especially if we work to promote our blog.

This means that blogging is a great way to build an audience. Therefore, we can use our blog to meet new people and we can exchange ideas with them.

It’s another way to communicate with people that are outside of the local circle of people.

Build Good Relations With Other Developers

We can build relationships with other developers with our own blogs. It makes us better by building relationships with them and then we can help each other.

This is an opportunity that we won’t find by just meeting people at our local locations.

The online world is infinite while our local circle is finite and limited. Building relationships online let us find help with people with more variety of knowledge and they’ll help us in the long run.

Learn New Technologies

Learning new technologies is given when we write a developer blog. If we want to run a blog continuously, we’ve to add new content to it.

If we want to add new content, then we have to learn new technologies so that we can keep populating our blog with new posts.

Therefore, blogging is a great opportunity to learn things that we otherwise wouldn’t have used in the past and keep us ahead of the competition.

Updated Ourselves With the Latest Technologies

In the same vein, we’ll update ourselves to update the technologies that we already know by blogging.

New versions of existing technologies are released all the time and we get to learn about the latest things by blogging about them.

Another benefit is that people like learning about the latest technologies as well.

Therefore, if we post about the latest technologies in our blog, we’ll also get readers since not a lot of people are posting about them yet but people want to know about them.

Show Our Skills

We can show off our skills by blogging about them. If we can teach others then, we know we know enough about the topic that we’re blogging about.

Therefore, it’s a great way to establish ourselves as an authority on a topic and then we can help others by teaching them.

Become More Self-Confident

By blogging about what we learn, we become more self-confident by learning about new technologies and using them to teach people or using them ourselves.

This means that we become more self-confident by helping ourselves and others by learning new technologies and applying our knowledge.

Self-confidence will help us outside of our work and also when we’re doing our developer work.

Conclusion

Developers should write a blog to make ourselves more confident, teach ourselves and others new skills, and update ourselves on the latest technologies in the world.

It’s also a great way to find an audience outside of our local circle of people. Then we can help each other and we can help them out.

Top comments (13)

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xanderyzwich profile image
Corey McCarty

Just a couple of notes regarding your wall of links at the top. If you use the RSS connection for your posts then you can mark canonical url on your blog site. This is not only good for the SEO of your website, but gives a link to your blog on every blog post. Your twitter account is linked on the Author card at the bottom of the article and if you include your medium link on your profile it will be there also. Beyond doing these few things, I would highly suggest putting the mention of your mailing list at the bottom of your article so that someone can see it once they've decided that they liked the article. I believe that these steps will make your articles more attractive and likely increase your mailing list subscriptions.

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aumayeung profile image
John Au-Yeung

Thanks for the tips.

I find that the audiences are different in different platforms.

So far I got more subscribers from here than other places.

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xanderyzwich profile image
Corey McCarty

This is a great platform. They have incorporated lots of things for you. Using the rss and canonical links helps with the way you get ranked by search engines. They will trash duplicate pages and having your site listed as the canonical means that search engines keep your page and trash the others (which are likely larger sites with better overall rankings) and having any link to your site improves your ranking as well.

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aumayeung profile image
John Au-Yeung

I didn't know about the RSS tool.

I should do that instead of cross-posting everything manually.

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xanderyzwich profile image
Corey McCarty

Yes

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aumayeung profile image
John Au-Yeung

But all it does is show the link to the original post.

At least for Medium, that's what it's doing.

Is that all it does?

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xanderyzwich profile image
Corey McCarty

That's all that that it does, but the label is something that search engines recognize.

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aumayeung profile image
John Au-Yeung

I see. That's convenient.

I guess both ways have value.

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aumayeung profile image
John Au-Yeung

If I import my WordPress feed, it'll get the content.

But if I import my Medium feed, it won't get the content.

Looks like it's just getting whatever is in the feed.

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xanderyzwich profile image
Corey McCarty

Yes

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kovidr profile image
Kovid Rathee

@aumayeung - Sharing knowledge freely is one of the reasons the software world has progressed as fast as it has. Greats of the industry like Paul Graham have been doing it for over two decades now. StackOverflow is possible because of this. Blogging is great. You work on something and you share with the world your successes, your failures, your dumb mistakes and your shining moments. You have listed some great points - valid, all of them!

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aumayeung profile image
John Au-Yeung

Yea. Sharing knowledge helps everyone including yourself.

Stack overflow would be nothing without users asking and answering questions.

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delta456 profile image
Swastik Baranwal

This is so true! I completely agree with you!