Why blog?
So why should you blog? A lot of smart people recommend blogging, even if you never want to achieve celebrity status (like patio11 or Tarah Wheeler), it lets you focus your thoughts and deepen your understanding on a particular topic. If you haven’t already a blog, you should get one this year and I will explain why.
So why is it important?
It’s important because through doing so, you will meet other people with the same interests (your peers) and you will be exposed to new ideas and have to defend your ideas (which isn’t that comfortable) in a way that does not come up in the workplace or at home. One of the fastest ways to gain expertise in an area is to work alongside people who are already experts. If you can not do that, observing or reading the words of experts is the next best thing.
This is not to say that we should only try to work with those who already really skilled. You can help new people learn what you already know. Your brain builds new pathways for material you teach, as you question it and rethink it. You can break up what you already know and test if its really true.
You can rant about what’s terrible and try to convience other people. This has the benefit that you can influence the progress of the things you care about. You can turn your knowledge into things you can keep, your writings!
Work on things you can show people
Patrick has a very nice post on this and talks about ending the week with having more human capital or more social capital or more reputational capital. Which is charming and a great idea. Its hard not to love that idea of continous improvement. We all want to be improving all the time and in life its sometimes hard to see that.
He talks about working on things you can show people. That so much of our lives are about working on things inside a company where no-one outside that company can see it. Which is a pity but something that blogging can help stop.
If you would like to help more people, but no one knows what skills you have, the only things you can do is what you seek out. If everyone knows what you love and what you are great at, they can come to you. If your really good at this, maybe too many will do this! However thats a problem everyone would like to have.
It’s the idea that at least part of your weekly work you should be able to point to as an example. In Angela Duckworks book on Grit, she gives an example of a cartoonist sending in 10 cartoons a day, and one being accepted. For your 40 hours a week at work and whatever number of hours outside of it, some of it should be visible afterwards. Really hard to disagree with that.
Your blog can show the hours you have put into learning your stuff. It shows your character and your musings. What you have thought about and what you might not have considered yet. There is a reason that Scott recommends against being a dark matter developer.
Andreas Weigend says that the value of sharing data about ourselves outweighs the risks of doing so. I am not sure I agree that is true for all people, but it’s hard to argue against having a minimum web presence to discuss your interests. I don’t recommend discussing your family life or schedule.
Technology
For Technology your blog can also be that notebook where you jot down that config change you keep making or how to find the process id and kill that server on linux (webbrick I’m looking at you).
Technology what I love. It might not be the thing you love, but you should write about whatever it is that you want to master. All the evidence says that will make you better.