As a software engineer it’s been a couple of years that I’m saying to myself that I’m going to start writing blog posts tomorrow, next week or even next month, but truth is I never did write a single blog post. The reason I didn’t start was, I thought, I’m not an expert of anything, not a famous person, and not good at writing, but a regular software engineer. Therefore, why should I take my time write a post and nobody even read it. That always stoped me starting a blog. But recently, after I read couple of blog posts from programmers and software engineers I changed my mind and decided blogging.
Now, I have many reasons to write blog posts as a programmer, also, I think every software developer should have blog. Let’s see why I decided to write a blog:
Learn faster and improve your technical skills
I learn much faster when I try to explain or to teach somebody. I know this from Computer Science class group work projects from the college, because I still remember everything I tried to explain and show to other group members. Explaining pushes you to learn more about the topic which is good not only for your readers but for your own self as well. Starting a programming blog is very similar to teaching because in your blog you will be teaching the world about programming and computer science.
Market yourself and kick start your career
Your blog will open the doors for various networking and business opportunities that you might not find otherwise. Through the blog, you can get a lot of connections and leads for an upcoming freelance and contractor career. I’m going to tell you a real life example about one of my friends, he started learning Java programming language, and shared his progress on his blog, and he had recruiters sending him job offer that he never applied to, and they found his posts shared online. And, he started his software engineering career even before he finished his Java course.
Document your progress for giving back
How many times a week do you find the perfect StackOverflow article that solves your problem and saves you hours of banging your head against a wall? How many times do you spend hours solving a problem, but no one else ever benefits from your solution?
Even if you write post from time to time, weekly, you can show what kind of challenges you faced, how you solved them, which methods and techniques you used and which one you avoided. After a year when you look back you will see really helpful documents you provided to others with useful insights and show how you approach problems.
Also, people with very little programming experience can much better show how they struggled with certain topics and where are the traps and non-obvious parts compared to experienced programmers. So, people who read your posts won’t fall into the trap that what you wrote about.
Learn how to communicate and present your ideas
Believe it or not but your software career heavily relies on how good you are at communicating and presenting your ideas. Even if you are a good programmer, without a good communication, and presenting yourself your software career won’t shine, and be limited. Also, many programmers claim that writing articles help them also write a better code.
Remove your stress
Disconnect from your daily routine of coding life, give yourself some freedom, be with your thoughts and write about something that you would like to share, share your own opinion, write it down and publish. It will make you feel relaxed.
In general, blogging as a software developer is an amazing way to increase your personality. Writing a blog can boost whatever you do or planning to do. It opens doors where you would never expect them. It worths to try, and see its benefits.
Top comments (71)
I fully agree with this but know that it can be very difficult to know how to start.
Most people are afraid of writing because they just don't know how to write the post itself. This was/is also the case for myself.
The best thing to do in that case is just write for yourself. You'll learn how to communicate better over time.
Just start writing something. You don't have to finish it in a day or two, write some paragraphs then come back and reread it, add some paragraphs, edit it, then you'll see that you are developing a skill.
Nice, thanks for the tip.
You welcome.
Thanks for the tip, I also find myself in this boat.
Thank you!
I wish I write blog, but every time I think I could use that time to do some more coding.
Do you have examples or really short posts blog, that doesn't take a lot of time?
Yes, it takes some time, but I do it when I'm not programming and have free time.
Hey, you can have a look to my "Tiny Tips" thread for examples: dev.to/tandrieu/tiny-tips-ordering...
If you have one small habit that really makes your life easier, and you notice nobody use it, just write about it. It takes less than 10min to write, less than 1min to read it and can be really helpful for other peoples.
I wish every blog also stated "years of experience with which languages and stacks, along with examples of the experiences"
It's just wishful thinking, but there are already a million blogs out there, 99% written by people who literally just learned about the subject that day and write something that sounds very informed but is often missing very important key components and even important insights that only come from real world experience with the subject.
so we have an internet full of blogs and tutorials that get you halfway there and then leave you hanging.
I've run into this plenty of times where i had to track down half a dozen blogs/tutorials and combine the info from all of them to finally get whatever it was i needed to do to actually work.
So sure, everyone write more, learn more...but please also state if you're still wet behind the ears, or have a decade of disgruntled experience to pass on ;)
Sorry @rav, I struggle to agree with the point about "still wet behind the ears".
Number one; and you already agreed on this, is that there is millions, if not more copy-paste-repeat work out there that is "half-baked". It will never change. The reason being most of it is some lame attempts to sell Companies' SaaS, Services, etc. And all to frequently they continue referring to their own firm, software or service.
It takes a minute to spot those. Read on or step away are the two options.
Secondly; the post of @nasirovelchin is about Learning through Blogging, not content writing.
Thirdly; most of us here are scared shit-less to write anything that will be public-facing, due to the fear of being judged as to "light" or to "wet behind the ears". So they hide in fear of reactions like this.
I wholeheartedly agree with Elchin. And my advice is to any of you that still have your doubts: Write, and write in as much detail as you need to in order to have a full, meaningful and learning experience with yourself.
Forget what the other readers might say, think, or even do with your work. Focus on what you are trying to teach yourself. Whether it be a quick two-minute read of something you need constant reminding of doing differently, or a two-hour read. It does not matter.
If you are happy that what you have "taught yourself" is clear and understandable by you, POST it already. If you are going to cheat on yourself by copy-pasting stuff that you still don't understand well enough, so be it. Best you don't waste time in cheating yourself.
However, "wet-behind-the -ears" students are far less prone to doing things half-assed than the overly-confident, all-knowing arrogant ones. Most of these beginner students would rater admit they are unsure, vs claiming they know exactly how something works.
If someone else happens to find your "self-tuition" valuable, all you can hope for is a "touched heart" in some remote corner of the post. If you are fortunate, someone that has been where you are now will pat you on the back and help you find clearer answers to remove your doubt.
Whether you are "wet behind the ears" is irrelevant.
If someone can't learn something from you "the child", then they are incapable of learning from another college professor.
I think you misunderstood my point.
When i mentioned writers being wet behind the ears, it was more that this is generally an unknown.
Right? when you read a blog you rarely know the skill level of the author.
If you're experienced you can quickly spot the issues in their writing and things that are missing and so on.
Newbies [the vast majority of devs have less than 5 years experience] can't spot the missing info. They don't have the experience to see when a blog is missing valuable information, so they learn either the wrong thing, or spend days trying to follow a tutorial that just doesn't work. I've even heard of newbies just giving up because they got stuck on something for a week, and often it's because of these badly written works.
By noting their own skill level, authors can be honest in how complete their writing is or is not.
This would only help us all
Thank you for your reply and clarification, Ravavyr.
Your points makes more sense when read in this context, however I've seen many an article by more advanced devs that simply assume and never mention the "obvious-to-them" in their tutorials. After-all, in their minds they are writing for the more advanced audience. So we're stuck again.
Your words "I've even heard of newbies just giving up because they got stuck on something for a week, and often it's because of these badly written works." rings loud and clear with me personally too. I was on many a verge of telling it all to go to hell. But even when reading more experienced dev's work, for the reasons given above. "Step 1, Step 2, Step 5, Conclusion. Huh! Am I that stupid?"
What made it even worse for me was the great intolerance towards very new beginner-devs found on Stackoverflow. I hated the site, especially when some poor newbie got told to go to hell, and no or clear explanation was given as to why they should scoot away. I have never dared open my mouth there, and probably will never do so. Even when I might get to senior level. For me' it's simply not worth the "ego-stroke" many of those d!ck-gods are after.
In the end I learned one thing: Go and verify everting from at least three different sources. And slowly over time I found that it works as a great filter.
The probability of two totally unrelated people stating the same knowledge vs one disparate out-lier being wrong, indicates fairly well that the guidance presented might be worthwhile spending more time on.
Then I discovered sites like DEV and Quicy's freeCodeCamp. I started getting value for my time and found that there's no such thing as stupid or incorrect questions there. It was and still is a great place to come to, be relaxed about it and ask or debate away.
There are also orders of magnitude more ladies on both the mentioned sites and that is another indication to me that no matter what your experience levels and gender are, you feel welcome.
I also often see the pressure on writers to be as succinct as possible, because its said that "people don't read anymore and will swipe your stuff away if there's nothing else but text."
Well I simply don't care about that anymore. I've decided to write to myself, do it as well as I can, give PROPER WORKING PRACTICAL examples, try to keep the flow logical from one thing to the next and insert whatever "history or reminders" I feel needed when trying to create associative links in my mind that's related to the specific section in the article/blog.
I don't care if it's a hundred pages. As long as I embed the knowledge by studying, writing, doing and then reiterating it via such a blog, then It's worth it's time in gold. If someone can benefit from it too, good.
Should it be noticed and people state that it helps them, and they want more, then you can consider putting in more quality time, polishing it and monetizing the stuff, and if so, doing it in moderation. As we've agreed, there's a lot of repeated half-baked work out there by both novices and pros where they ask money for it. Even using other's work, sometimes almost verbatim, or use ChatGPT to create 70-80% of it.
I can go ask "Assistant" myself for free or for a far more efficient spend of my money. Then go verify it from a few other sources and apply it to my tuition.
Thanks again for having my two-cents' and all the best!
Oh i fully agree with all of that.
Stack Overflow is a great resources to search for answers, but the community is toxic as hell.
You get great experienced answers, but don't use the community just google for "something stack overflow" to find what you need.
Don't even bother with Reddit. Small web dev community and toxic as hell too.
Funny enough, Twitter has a really nice and supportive dev community, but all the major players aren't really heavy devs in as much as they are good at writing snippets and things that get likes and shares, at the same time they bring together devs as a community much better. It's a very low experience community though.
Then there's those separate communities like the two you mentioned. I would also recommend LeanWithLeon, the #100devs community who also write a lot here.
A few notes on tutorials by experienced devs. You're right they often don't put things they take for granted into their tutorials. Like everyone assumes you know how to FTP/SSH or how to install Node JS or MySQL.
It would be better if they mentioned that or even linked to other tutorials explaining those.
The arrogance you get from a lot of older devs is something i'm quite familiar with. Hell, i give it out sometimes, or well often, too. So an example on why this happens with me:
For any given problem there are X solutions in dev. There's never just one way of doing something.
So anyone telling you "This is the only way" is really saying "This is the only way i know"
I get a lot of newbies telling me "this is how you have to do X" and me going "nah, there's at least half a dozen other ways to do it, and your way isn't the best, here's what i know works best because i've been doing this a long time"
But sometimes i'm tired, so a newbie says "do it this way" and i just snap "no, that doesn't work, do it this way if you want it to work"...and suddenly, i'm the bad guy. In the dev community everyone's quick to judge and i don't always have the patience to care. I give my opinion freely along with advice as best as i can. That's all i can do.
Thanks for spending your valuable time with this reply, Ravavyr.
I appreciate the confirmation that I'm not the only one smelling the rat in some of these groups and communities. I suppose it also has a ton to do with all the pressure and stress most devs have been and still are under. Especially over the past two years with the pandemic snapping at your heels, while the stay-at-home hackers were having a feast in ripping the net apart from every angle. Forcing even heavier loads on all in the pro-dev arena.
Another thank you for those references to #100Devs and LearningWithLeon. I'm busy checking them out as I'm replying to you.
All the best, and may the sun shine there on your side of this crazy Rock!
I write mine, but it is so hard to be consistent 😴
I know, same here. It's hard to be consistent, but at least try.
I have a really boring style of writing though, that I don't want to bother anyone with. I'm better at commenting 😅
It gets better when you write :)
As long as you don't bore yourself, you are good to go. Forget what others might think or say. Write to yourself, Rense.
Thank you for this, I'm new to blogging myself and often hit writer's block brain storming topics. Instead of focusing on theory, I will write about the challenges I've faced as a very new programmer.
Thank you!
I think that's an interesting topic, talking about the challenges while learning programming.
I agree 💯 Writing has SO many advantages and when you are also getting paid to write then the passion increases even more.
If I solve a difficult problem or figure out something cool I like to write a blog post about it. Hopefully it benefits others
Actually it's a good idea.
You read my mind, thanks for the inspiration. Cheers!
You welcome @akhi1.
Your post was super inspirational and I just finished my first blog post. Thank you!
Thanks and good luck to you. Keep writing.