What the Blog?! or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog.
In my role as a data scientist, working in an agile tech startup, I do a lot of independent work and investigation into quite complex methodologies. I need to be able to communicate this work to other, who 1) are perhaps not available to “hear” about my work, 2) perhaps have no idea about my work, but are interested to learn and 3) probably aren’t data scientists.
To solve all of these issues and reduce the amount of meeting we have (!), we use blogs to knowledge share. If more people understand what is is being done, that means we have a higher bus number and there are more people to help and query your work and methodology.
For those of us not used to writing long-form text to be consumed by others, or even those of us who are, but are perhaps used to spending months working on a report for a boss or a client, here are some tips I’ve found useful to just get you writing and publishing sooner and quicker!
Some key things to remember to help you blog more and more often:
- It don’t have to perfect.
The human brain is surprisingly good a deciphering codes. There are lots of decent spelling and grammer checking software out there these days, however, if there is a word missing or a minor typo, generally people will still be able to understand your meaning and refrain from calling the grammar police.
2. Publish, publish, publish.
Science (academia to be more precise) is known as a dog eat dog world; if you don’t publish it now, someone else will! Take that point of view with your blogs too. Why waste someone else’s time writing a blog you have already finished, but just not got round to hitting the publish button yet (perhaps for fear of Number 1)
3. Less, more often.
This one may be kind of counter intuitive, but it is much easier to digest one page of literature than it is a whole book (it’s also easier/quicker to write!). So be concise and once you’ve got to a reasonable resting point, publish! If you have more to say, write a follow up the next day, or next week. Your point is much more likely to be read and understood in its entirety if you serialise it and give people time to digest.
4. Interest.
If you found something interesting or helpful, it’s probably quite likely others will too. I keep notes every time I feel like I’m learning something. These notes can then form the backbone of a short blog, which will be fleshed out with your own personal thoughts and opinions.
5. Ohhh shiny!
Humans are generally quite visual creatures. Why not interject your blog with images or diagrams (I am aware there are none in this post!)? These could be ripped from the internet or grabbed from your screen, both of which are generally easy to do and with a platform like Medium they can just be easily inserted most of the time.
6. I read somewhere that…
Perhaps this is again from my time in academia, but I’m a stickler for checking references on wiki pages. There’s a contemporary saying that “if it’s on the internet, it must be true”, meaning that anyone can say anything about any subject. Why not inject some hyperlinks to your sources in your blog? This way others know where you got your information, even if they don’t believe/like you!
I hope someone finds this short guide useful and gets you started on your own blog series!