For non believers of blogging
Most of the times when some techie (my colleague or any friend) asked me “what is blogging?” or “how blogging can help us”. I just got attentive and its my time to sell my stuff 🙂 I started narrating the benefits of writing blogs. I have come up with many developers who are writing code for years but didn’t know about this Internet revolution. I have convinced and influenced some of my friends and colleagues to start writing technical blogs. And now they feel the difference. They have their own identity to speak with the world, and now they think something innovative about the areas they are expert and they write.
How blogging helps
Actually blogging is some sort of “Self Realization” for any developer. Like you share some idea, utility code or wrote any tutorial on your blog and you like people commenting on your stuff and talking about yourself.You are extending your socio-technical circle. That can help in your career. Also from the prospective of employer too. In good organizations those developers are preferred who can give technical judgment on things they are doing. And for that purpose people do blog to extend their knowledge breath wise.
My primary purpose for blogging was to have a reference of some code snippets that are helpful in day to day programming. And to give my personal opinion and judgment on software development and other tech-industrial things. I daily spent two hours on reading different technology and programming blogs to keep my knowledge up to date. As in our industry things keep on evolving so its should be an integral part of our work to keep our self intact with the latest knowledge.
Why programmers cant blog?
Because programmers are found little moderate in verbal and communication skills. If they can write unbreakable logics why the there is problem to write it down somewhere. Programmers usually lack this aptitude. Those guys read technical blogs, knows ‘CodingHorror’. Let me quote one thing from there.
Technical programming skills are certainly important. But general writing and communication skills are far, far more important. Even if you’re merely a humble programmer.
I have wrote a related post on non-cs skills that every programmer must have. This point is discussed there in detail.
Keep blogging and have fun.
I agree on that. Blogging is, even though not the only one, one of the best medium for knowledge sharing. It’s like documenting our learning.
So, every programmer should try to document whatever learning he has acquired during a course of a project/career. That helps the programmer himself as well as the other programmers out there.
Very True !!. I have personally realized that writing a blog helps me in better understanding of concept and also motivates me to learn new thing and put on blog
Thanks Harshit and Veera for your comments.
I hope your replies with this post encourage developers to write about their technical knowledge to be share with others.
I would assert it is not only a good idea, but our duty to blog. As you mentioned blogging serves as a qualified knowledge distribution mechanism. In my opinion blogging is a sort of open source contribution too. I blogged (:)) about it here:
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2413&blogid=35
Hi Kit;
Its a great idea, that blogging is open source contribution. I like that. Thanks for it.
Well, you started off good. I wish you had completed the post and went into more detail :).
Now to say programmers are incompetent or they lack the skills to write is a bad generalization. Programming is not just about writing code. And blogging is nothing to do with programming. They are not totally mutually exclusive, but they are not overlapping either. It takes time and space to blog – most just don’t have that much time and space to blog. That’s sort of an excuse, but not exactly. It’s like doing community service – we all can but how many of us really do? And then I personally believe that its better not to blog than to blog crap.
For me, blogging teaches me a lot of things.
1. consistency
2. how to be innovative (I heard a great entrepreneur saying if you want to be innovative, ask people about their problems).
3. How to be humble
4. How to share
5. How to socialize
I don’t need any of that to be a good programmer. KnR never blogged. Knuth never blogged. Linus never blogged. People never blogged before blogs came into existence and there have been some real hero programmers of the yore. But all of these heroes communicated, interacted, socialized nonetheless. Great programmers socialize. Great programmers share. Great programmers take the community with them. If a blog lets you do that – good. But I’d rather say join a newsgroup, an open source project, join chat rooms than write a blog. Because those things are more important to a programmer.
Just my two cents 🙂
I agree with your thoughts especially with this:
“Actually blogging is some sort of “Self Realization” for any developer. ”
I can’t count how many times I’ve realized errors in my code by merely blogging them. I’ve observed that compared to just thinking about them while wading through your code, blogging is actually a more effective debugging tool!
Kewl! 😀
I absolutely agree with your opinion…
We can share our code, knowledge with other… If we make some mistake, other people can give us right solution…
sorry if my english so bad