It's funny, but when I talk with friends or colleagues about some of the articles I wrote, one of the most common question is: Why are u blogging?
They do not ask what I blog about, they ask why.
So I realized I really have to write a blog post about why I write blog posts?!
Obviously all of us write stuff on the internet because we want to share something. But again, why do we want to share?
My reason
Almost all the stuff I know, most of the stuff I learned and will learn come from a blog in one form or another.
It might be a coding blog like baeldung, it might be a blog which sums up papers, like the morning papers, it might be a developer hub like Dev.to!
I really have to thank the community for the amount of useful information they shared.
So, as you might have understood at this point, blogging is my attempt to give something back to the community, my tiny little contribution.
I have also found out, how rewarding it is to document my ideas or little discoveries. Because...
If you can't explain it, you don't understand it well
Conclusion
Now I have a blog post for all those times in which someone is going to ask me:
How come you write a blog?
And you? What's your reason?
Thanks!
Top comments (12)
I blog because I like to share things I've done in case they are useful to other people. But I also blog because I like to write down things that I've done so that I can remind myself of the thing one day when I need to do it again. So in reality, I blog so that I can teach future Phil how to do something and hopefully in the meantime other people find it useful.
Teaching the future self is a great point!
You know you're doing a good job when you search for something and you find your post in the results!
For that you also need some help from uncle Google XD
I blog because I want to share whatever knowledge I have (which isn't a lot tbh) with anyone and everyone out there. Especially to the beginners. There's something addictive about blogging- and it's a good addiction. Blogging makes me feel better!
Few years ago I read about commonplace books, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln all kept a commonplace book. Roughly speaking it's a scrap book of everything they find interesting. So I started doing the same thing.
Whilst I'd love become an amateur write or literary critic at the moment coding consumes most of my time, hence my commonplace book - without me wanting it to - turned into a personal technical blog.
The reason why I started to publicly publish some of what I write is because it's fun!
The "giving back to the community" is a good answer, I'll use it is anyone I might want to impress asks but for me it's just fun. I do it in private so why no publish 1% of it just to test the waters :)
Agree, on the other hand it can also be a lot of work. Indeed when I write on a notebook, I can be inaccurate, write just couple of pointers, etc.
While writing on a blog, I need to tell a more complete story, define a structure about the thing I want to document.
Absolutely. Most cases it takes me a week to write on tutorial.
It's hard work. But I like to believe all this is helping me somehow
(It's not that I've been doing this for a long time though)
Pretty similar to my workflow XD
I blog partly to remember things I have just learned, partly to memorialize things that I'm proud of and partly to help others out
"Almost all the stuff I know, most of the stuff I learned and will learn come from a blog in one form or another." This is so true. Recently I have been installing some tools on Debian OS, and I've benefited a lot from people that shared their experiences and how to(s) on their blogs.
I blog on dev.to because I think it's beneficial for my career, and I think people enjoy what I blog about, and I just like it :)