More and more people write blogs and books nowadays. The activity is getting increasingly popular, however people have various reasons for doing it. I do not aspire to be a professional writer, but writing has become a valuable activity for me in recent years. Here are my motives.
Learning new things
Writing allows me to gain knowledge by proactive posing questions and searching for answers instead of reactive consuming information. When I am going to write about something I need to stretch my understanding of the topic. It forces me to seek information, instead of being a passive recipient of knowledge at my fingertips.
The process of writing also changed the way I read books and articles. In the past, I just read the content. On the other hand, I now take notes since they may provide important insights for future articles or blog posts. This side effect has made my reading effects more robust. I usually remember more from books and understand the content better.
Clarity of thinking
Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test.
P. Graham, Putting ideas into words
The process of writing exposes gaps in your thinking in a great way. Until you write your ideas down, you are usually convinced they are consistent and logical. However, when you start writing you see how many things are unclear, how many concepts have to be refined, and how many holes need to be filled.
Sharing ideas
Before I started my blog, I thought that I could not provide any new and valuable insight. I was afraid that I couldn't provide anything original. I believed that almost everything had been already written.
Of course, the above apprehensions may be true but my mindset is now entirely different. Even if your work is redundant to something that already exists, you can still reach somebody who would encounter a given idea for the first time. Or you may convey it more simply or comprehensively.
When we gain some information, we quickly start taking it for granted and assess it as something trivial or straightforward. But we usually underestimate our knowledge and skills. What is easy for us, can be difficult (and valuable) for others.
Getting feedback
Sharing your ideas as a blog post can be a great way to gather feedback. In recent years I received several comments on my articles that caused me to refine my ideas or broaden the scope of my investigations.
The first example is the post "An Event-driven Approach Is Not a Golden Hammer". One of the readers pointed out that I overlooked the concept of event bus-driven commands. The comment allowed me to improve my understanding of Event-Driven Architecture.
The second example was "The Myth of Natural Talent". The article landed on Hackernews where I received a critical comment that my text lacked sufficient scientific research to support its claims. I started extensive research on the topic again and prepared the follow-up post: "The Talent Debate: Does Mastery Require Giftedness?" that extends ideas from the original article.
Last but not least, receiving positive feedback is nice and can give some dopamine.
Improving skills
English is not my mother tongue. Although I use it every day at work I am still far away from proficiency. Writing in a non-native language has become an opportunity to improve my fluency.
I am still not a great technical writer or casual speaker. But see how I improved over time.
Portfolio / Archive
Writing became a tool for documenting my work. It shows what topics interest me over time.
Several years ago, I delivered a tech talk in my company about the SQLAlchemy approach to transactions. I delved deeply into the topic but did not transform the talk into an article or document. Now, I hardly remember the intricacies of SQLALchemy (because don't use it in my current projects) and
I feel like I've lost something.
Documented knowledge lives longer and scales better.
I do not have a mission that persists me with writing. I aspire to become an advocate of any technology that uses writing to convince people to do something. However, writing turned into a tool that helped me hone my abilities and get better at a lot of things. I wholeheartedly urge you to give it a try.
Here are two great articles related to the topic that I also recommend to read: