Back in high school, one of my stricter English instructors forced us to keep a daily log to get us to write on a daily basis. The idea of blogging helps the writing process as it’s easy to slowly lose confidence in one’s abilities to present ideas in a clear manner. When you combine writing with coding practices, you’ll see a powerful tool emerge from these practices.
At my university, I used to act as a tutor for our lower division computer science courses. Often, during labs, I would be constantly asked to help people struggling with coding exercises. Every time I explained how something worked like pointers, stacks, arrays, etc., I found it to be an exercise for myself as well in terms of reinforcing my knowledge in those areas. The thing is that you’re not simply regurgitating trivial facts you memorize exclusively for tests, but realizing the bigger picture and helping different types of people with various levels of understanding learning to grasp what you know.
In a similar way, I find blogging about topics that I struggle with a great manner to reinforce what I learn in my career as a developer. Sometimes, I find documentation lacking or poorly explained to the point where I figure it’s just better for me to post something. When I write up a post, my goal is to convey my struggles in a manner where I can start seeing how things fit.
The great thing about this process is being able to share my knowledge with others. I think blogging is great as a platform to contribute to the Open Source and development community at large. While someone like myself might not work on the core code for many frameworks, I still think it’s equally important once we obtain a certain level of understanding to share that knowledge with others as it’s almost guaranteed that people will have very similar issues.
Unfortunately, the only thing being able to bind all these lessons and documentation together is Google. That said, I hope that I am able to contribute some worth while advice to others struggling.