Why Every Developer Should Have a Blog

Published on Jan 06, 2020 - 5 min read

It doesn't matter whether you are a beginner or experienced programmer, blogging can give you a lot of benifits to you and your career, also it's a way of giving back to the developer community around the world. Many people think that blogging is only for people who want to make some passive income appart from their day job, there are also other benifits to blogging which might not be obvious for people who aren't activily writing about their work.

These are the top 5 reasons I personally think why every developer should have a blog and write what they know or learnt from their experience.

1. Learn and Improve Programming Skills

It may not sound intutive expecting to learn about programming by writing a blog, but i belive this the most important reason why programmers have the habbit of writing blog. As it always said, the better way to learn things is by teach someone and this is so appropriate for programmers.

There are a few reasons why blogging is exceptionally good for this:

When you publish a blog post for the world to see, it adds pressure to make sure you know what you’re talking about. No one wants to write something that shows they just don’t get it, so the added pressure teaches you to dig deeper and think about what you’re explaining.

Explaining a concept is much more difficult than “knowing” it. You may be able to connect to APIs from Android code without breaking a sweat, but writing about it and teaching others requires a deeper understanding of what’s actually going on. You need to be able to explain what’s going on under-the-hood.

2. Collecting Snippets of Useful Code

Depending on what the information is, I vary how I capture it. If it's something that would be useful as step-by-step instructions with additional explanations and details, I usually capture these as a blog entry. If it's something I don't want to publicly share, I sometimes create private posts that are not shared, or keep them separate in a notebook.

If it's a snippet of useful code, or a few simple and short lines of code, I collect them using Github's Gist. For longer worked examples, I create a project on GitHub and commit a code example there. The majority of my projects on GitHub are code examples where I was looking at something new and put together a worked example as part of learning whatever that new thing was.

3. Sharing Lessons Learned With Others

The majority of the time when I search for info on how to use a new library or framework, the most useful content I find is usually an article written by a developer who worked through the steps on how to use something.

This type of content wouldn't be online at all if that other developer hadn't taken the time to create it and share it. The great thing about the internet for software development is that content is easy to find if you Google, but people need to take the time to write and share that content in the first place. If you have something to share, even if you think it's obscure or might not be useful, there's always someone else who is working on something similar. They might be struggling to work something out — help out your fellow developers and share your knowledge.

Every developer has something they've worked on that would be useful to another developer trying to learn and get up to speed on that same thing. Even if you're a new developer with a few months' experience, you still have lessons you've learned from your own experiences that would be useful to another developer with less (or even more) experience following their own skills development path.

4. Build relations with new developers

Blogging helps you to develop new ties with other developers. How? Let me tell you. When you publish an original post; for instance, you publish a how-to guide to coding in JQuery, It goes live to the world and millions of people including some tech giants read it and in this way, you can connect with other bloggers who have great developer teaching stuff just like you.

A blog opens the magical doors to talk to and share your thoughts and make connections.

5. Creates a Timeline of Your growth

Blogging consistently, allows you to chronicle the evolution of your skills while you’re learning to code. You will see the progress in you from post to post, and this growth motivates you to keep going. Your blog can also help in your career development. You can ask the potential employers to see your blog, so it would leave a good impact on them when they look at your connections or posts. It may help you get a job. Isn’t it great?

Conclusion

As a programmer, you must know your importance in this tech-centric world. You are an important asset of the generation. Apart from earning 80k to 90 k per month, you should spend some of your time on blogging. It will add extra benefits to your career and you can be a reason to inspire other fellow programmers or students. Know your worth and the importance of blogging for you.

Keep coding and also keep writing!