Why to Blog?

It’s 19:13. I could be doing anything right now. However, I choose to sit down, open a laptop and write down my thoughts. Why am I doing this?

There was a lot already written about why one should write a blog. Lot of great reasons already listed out there, for example:

• Ben Kuhn - “Why and how to write things on the Internet”
• Paul Graham - “Writes and Write-Nots”

However, blogging can just be stating the obvious so I will state reasons that are obvious for me:

• It’s a great exercise for my mind. To produce a blog post, thinking is needed. I know that you can play a game and ask LLM to write it for you. However, the whole point of writing these posts is to do an exercise of thinking. It takes an effort and you need to have an idea what to write about. Then you need to order your thoughts and put them out in the clear way, so others can follow. So you also improve your communication skills this way.

• To stay in touch with people you don’t meet often anymore. On my way I met lot of great engineers doing many crazy things. I’m not good at following up. However, if I’m able to get these people signed into my RSS - such posts may be great opportunity to reconnect!

• It’s a cheap way to get some feedback. Create a simple list of people who may be interested in reading your blog. For example if you’re working as software engineer - your team may be your first small audience - give them a way to unsubscribe. It can be simple RSS feed for starters. Add some way to give comments to blog posts. If you gather people from different environments with similiar interests - some interesting conversations may be sparked with your posts! (I’m not there yet, but hopefully will be one day!)

• I can inspire others this way. I have following assumption: anyone I meet on my way is better in something than me. But reverse is true as well - I’m better at something than any person I meet on my way. As a junior engineer in my team I could inspire some folks from my team to get better at CLI. People, who were much better from me in coding, designing, testing and many more things. No matter where you are - there are people who are trying to learn things you already know. It’s worth to put stuff out there so you can inspire others.

• I don’t need to repeat myself. There are lot of thougts I tend to repeat over and over. When I meet someone new - I can refer to blog post into which I put some effort already instead of starting all over.

• You can get to know me better and faster. If content on my blog turns out to be interesting for you - there is a chance you’ll read more than one post. You can find out what are my opinions and what interests me. So whenever we meet, even if it’s the first time - you can just make a shortcut and skip the small talk. You already know a bit of me!

• It motivates me to do more cool things. I’m wired in the way, that showing my work to others make me feel good. I feel excitment and wonder how others will react. Will the idea I’m publishing surprise them? Maybe impress? Or they will be embarassed looking at it? I like this thrill. Don’t me even start how much I like when I get some positive reaction!

Once my friend told me a story why she doesn’t want to present anything to the team. Once she saw a small kiddo throwing ball from one hand to other and shouting to parents if they saw it. Her friend cringed and asked why this kiddo is so proud about it - anyone can do it. So her argument for not putting out ideas was that she doesn’t want to be like this kiddo.

I think that the key is to focus on these who still can’t throw a ball from one hand to another and can learn it from you. These who can will tell me how I can do it even better or what else I should try. Or maybe laugh at me, but I don’t care about these!

At the end, I’d like to share some mind blowing blog posts I really enjoyed reading and inspired me a lot:

• Staring into the abyss as a core life skill - by Ben Kuhn
• Life is Short - by Paul Graham
• Software Engineer Checklist - by Michał Lewandowski
• Money is the Map - by geohot
• Building competency is better than therapy - by DHH
• Focus - by Jeff Kaufman
• Sense of aesthetics - by my older brother who I know will be reading this and I want to be nice to him haha 😅

I hope that one day I’ll be able to write posts like these… and won’t be afraid to publish posts that are of much worse quality!

Cheers! 🍻