I've been writing small articles on different tech sites for a few years now. Responding to questions of developers by explaining all I know about a specific topic, or just helping them out with a problem. This is all pretty rewarding when you receive positive feedback and know that you helped someone else with your own knowledge / ideas.
Now and then, people tell me "You should have a blog". And I'm always responding with something that ends with ".. too much work". But lately I was thinking, when I get asked about a topic I've written about in the past I have to go through all the different archives to find and to refer to it. That is sometimes "too much work"!
Besides that, a blog can be useful for many reasons. The place where you have your audience and express your ideas. So, I've decided that "I should have a blog".
Having a blog
Every developer should write (or blog) on a regular basis, and here are my thoughts why.
Learn
They say you never fully understand a topic until you are able to explain it. If you write on a regular basis, you will also do a lot of research for your posts. There will always be things you thought you knew. But when you're writing a post about that topic, you always learn something new about that topic.
Write better
Writing blog posts can help to improve your writing skills. A developer does not only write code, but you also have to document your code, write emails and lots of other stuff like that. And when you face the challenge that English is not your native language, you will learn something new with every blog post, and also your English will improve with every blog post.
Besides that, you will also learn how to better express yourself and your ideas. Writing articles also helps writing better code.
Meet people
It's also an excellent opportunity to meet new people because you suddenly get much more awareness. People will send you questions and comments and you will get in contact with them on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Inspire
Write about your choices, their pros, and showing the code you like. It will influence others in your team and in the whole world to write code similar to what you like. They can be from very high-level decisions like libraries and frameworks, down to much smaller aspects such as the a number of function arguments, named parameters and inheritance vs composition.
Conclusion
After writing this first article here, I have a blog.