Contents
If you look through my blog history, you will notice I don’t have as many posts as I could have had, considering I made my first post in 2015.
I would like to share why I feel motivated to write and share more, perhaps now more than ever before.
A public journal of knowledge
I have been freelancing for a while. I believe I have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge through my professional assignments, side projects, and conversations with my peers.
Yet, I often have no way of revisiting what I learned. It certainly has made me realize that there’s value in blogging. It can be a reference not just for yourself, but other developers as well.
At the same time, I will acknowledge that it is not always possible to publish regularly. Project deadlines can be tricky, or we may just have too much going on in our lives to be able to churn out material we see fit for publishing.
Verifiablity of skills & knowledge
Prospective employers usually have a few ways of verifying that you are, in fact, as good as you say you are.
The tools they resort to are references from your past employers or current employees (outside of your direct control), interviews (which developers are often not fond of), and your publicly available projects on a git repository like GitHub or GitLab (which you may not always have or may feature playground code; nothing that works against you, but probably not the ideal reflection of your skill.)
Keeping a technical blog is a sure way to show employers you understand something well enough to be able to write about it. In fact, writing about any interesting or original work helps you stand out! I also believe it shows you care about the community enough to give back.
Participating in an open web
I have recently implemented IndieWeb on my site. You can see I publish notes as well now, which automatically syndicate to Fosstodon and Twitter.
The replies I receive on my blog posts and notes towards the bottom of the page come from Fosstodon, Twitter, as well as other websites participating in this movement. This is an open standard called webmention, and the specification is available for you to read on W3.
While IndieWeb is not yet fully or perfectly integrated to my site, I see a lot of value in the ideas of the movement. When other people, or developers, share their opinion on your articles or notes, it becomes a social proof of the value of your content in the community.
If you’d like to participate, I found this to be a very helpful starting point.
My explanation might help someone reach their “aha” moment
While it is true most topics and concepts have been explained to no end, I believe there is still value in what one has to say.
One’s world view is unique to them. The way they understand something and explain it is unique.
Sharing one’s take on a concept might just be what a stranger on the internet was looking for to make sense of things.
Final word
I am wary of the fact that not only do opinions change, but even technical or factual content can become out-of-date. Inspired by Kev’s blog post, I too have implemented a similar notice on my older posts. As I already have a draft notice displayed on blog posts tagged #draft, much of the foundational work was already available for me to build on.
All things considered, I believe this is a step in the right direction, and with the inclusion of IndieWeb and a notice on posts as they age, I am very excited for the future of my blog.