With the explosion of internet in our lifes and platforms to share informations, a lot of people are publishing posts on differents subjects. In the IT industry, these posts can be about a concept, technologies or tools. And we read a lot of them.
Why these posts are so importants?
These posts are importants because it will often help us to understand how to use something, how can we improve our skills... or resolve an issue that someone else has already encountered.
Often more accessible than documentations, they have a playful way to teach things that helps to understand complexe notions notably with examples and/or schemas.
Why everyone should have a blog ?
In this IT world, we search informations online everyday, so having a blog will let you share what you've experienced, what you've discovered, some tips, how to resolve particular issues...
Don't you ever wondering why there's no posts on a particular subject or on a particular error?
If yes, you will understand why it can be important to share this kind of informations.
Also a lot of tools are in niches which are not easy to find and/or understand. So having posts about it will help to expose it and having more informations for anyone which want to use it and understand how it works.
Winnings to have a blog
Without talking about money or other things like that, having a blog can have huge payoffs for you.
Subject mastering
A principe of education says that if someone wants to memorize easily something or to start to master a subject, they must be able to explain with their own words the subject. May be in a easier way with examples.
It doesn't make you think about something?
Earlier we said that articles that are posted online are often simple explainations about more complexe concepts. For sure some people don't need to write these posts to memorize and master the subject, but a lot of people like me are writing posts to help them to see if they are able to explain and summarize all the informations they learned about a subject.
From my experience, I garantee you that it helps me to memorize a lot of things. The work to find a way to explain the subject with your own words is really powerful. Because as you already know the words you are using, you don't have to remember the definition of a lot of new words. And naturally the information will be easier to remember.
Improve writing skills
By writing posts you will improve your writing skills. Being able to explain things requires to be a bit organized. So writing will help you with this.
Also it will help you to figure out what is the most important informations to share in a few lines.
Improve in a foreign language
It doesn't concern everyone, but it's something that help me a lot : improve my skills in another language.
To be able to share my posts to a lot of people, I write my posts in english. Even it's the language used is almost all the technical documentations, being able to explain something in english requires more vocabulary at least and helps to improve our communication skill in this language.
Conclusion
For all these reasons, that's why I think everyone should have a blog. For sure it's a huge time investment for may be nothing. (I wrote technical posts for the last 3 years and I didn't earn anything) But it's still interesting to do it and I encourage anyone to give a try.
I hope it will help you and if you have any questions (there are not dumb questions) or some points are not clear for you, don't hesitate to add your question in the comments or to contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Top comments (3)
Thanks for sharing.
I mostly agree. I just disagree on one thing : not everyone should have a blog. There are too many duplicate articles out there, it becomes difficult to find reliable information. OK it is important to have every subject covered, but not a gazillion times.
It depends on how blogging is done. If it's the same information duplicated without any references, yes it will be hard to find the reliable information. If you have references and links in the post, it will be easier for you to find the original information.
But it's another subject (strongly related for sure to this one), the way to blog. And for this, I would agree that to find the correct information can be really difficult if there are no references or explainations.
I agree (with you, not the OP). And most blogs out there are poorly written and are just plain wrong.
If you want to keep your own personal notes, fine; but you don't need to publish them.