1. Your Experience is Unique
Your past is not parallel to anyone else's. Things that happened as a kid, choices you made, your parents made, landed you to where you are today. For example: My experience is unique because I wasn't really exposed to computers growing up. I grew up in a very rural area, and didn't discover programming as an option until a class in college I admittedly signed up for as a misunderstanding. I HAD NO IDEA what I was doing and quite frankly had no business doing it. Do you think there's others coming into this field that are also stumbling their way through this? Yup.
2. Help Shed Perspective for Others
When I was a junior developer, I didn't feel like I had enough pull or knowledge to share with the world. But what I realized when I gained some experience is that there were people behind me just trying to accomplish what I did - getting their first job, or landing an internship, or attending a career fair. All those things are valid experiences that someone attending their first milestone will surely look up advice for.
3. Make a Name for Yourself
As you blog, you'll begin showing up in Google searches from people looking to learn more on what you wrote about. You have already marked yourself as knowledgeable on that topic! Now imagine this, when a recruiter searches for you, they find your blog where you share about ALL the things you know! How impressive does that look?
4. A Coding Trail
Have you ever had to do some tricky code that you have to look up every single time you use it? I know I have. The best decision I made was to blog about it, so the next time I needed to look it up, I knew right where to look.
The other dynamic of this is that you have a trail of how far you've come. Sure it's embarrassing to find your old code out there.. but everyone grows and improves. It can also be a fun exercise to look back at some old posts and improve on them.
Latest comments (28)
I was blogging for a long time in the past about completely different topics. Never dared to do that in tech because i always thought i did not have the "authority" and knowledge to do that.
"Document, don’t create" from GaryVee and this post (expecially the Coding Trail part) were the 2 things that prompt me in 2019 to start blogging on dev.to
Thanx :-)
Love it!
This was a great and inspiring blog for me, I joined DEV community today only and this is the second blog I have got to read. A great kick start to be an amazing blogger! Thanks Kim Arnett for writing about something which everyone experience
but fail to delineate.
I'm using this idea but putting a spin on it, cause I think the english-speaking tech world is kind of really crowded nowadays. I want to share the knowledge with others who don't have it readily available because of language barriers or technical ones. Thanks for sharing this :)
Apart from blogging, you can consider opensourcing your solution through gist, codepen or a github repo.
I just started blogging for all of these reasons. I think #4 is the most important for me because many times when Im stuck and feel like Im making no progress, I reference my blog/coding log and see exactly how far I've actually come.
Nice post Kim, with good advice!
Thanks these informations are amazing, i am Android dev and i am enjoying you
Perhaps most importantly: "you probably had to do research to create the solution that you did and you'll probably need to solve a similar problem in the future, write it all up so you don't have to go through a full research-evolution just to re-solve that future problem." Search results - even for the exact same search-string(s) change over time. If you don't write stuff down, the next time you go looking, things may be harder to find.
Point number 2 just hits the nail on the head!
There were a lot of things I wish I knew at various stages in my career for which Googling doesn't help as such. Now that I've a fair idea of them through experience, I'll use this blog post as an inspiration to write on them :)
Yes! You will help out way more people then you realize 🙌🏼