How a Blog can put you ahead
After some recent thinking about my past experiences with blogging, I am excited to continue blogging and writing. I managed my first blog, talkmobiledev.com, for six months and it taught me important lessons that have helped me with my career, time management, software development, and professional development, all of which I will go over in this post.
Being Disciplined
I would say that most of the benefits that came out of blogging would not have been experienced if I was not dedicated to maintaining the blog in a consistent and disciplined manner. When I started the blog, I decided that I would release a post every Saturday no matter what. While this might not seem like a daunting task at first, the reality is that blogs are more than just sitting at a computer and writing a quick article. There is much more work involved with researching, experimenting, and drafting that is happening behind the scenes which can be difficult to allocate time for to meet that weekly deadline, especially with other responsibilities during the week. However, that being said, I believe if someone were to make this commitment to maintain a blog, they can seriously put themselves ahead of the game in their career and overall personal development.
Formalizing Your Knowledge
The biggest benefit to maintaining your own blog is that it teaches you how to formalize the information that you are taking in. As software developers we must be experts in managing the chaos that is software. This means that the best engineers are those that have the ability to organize themselves and think strategically about the problems they are faced with on a day to day basis. It is one thing to understand the information that is coming to you verbally, but being able to take that information and communicate it through writing is a whole different skill in itself. This is because your brain cannot put together all components of a topic at the same time, leaving many ambiguities. It is not until you actually try to lay out all of the information in a formal article, that you realize how much you don’t know about a particular topic. Someone else, who has no previous knowledge of the topic, should be able to come in and understand your topic at the same level that you do after reading the article. Therefore developing the skill to communicate information, especially if technical, is really great and helpful in your career. Now I never work on any project without documenting what I am working on. This is not only valuable for me to formalize the knowledge, but if anyone ever needs to come in and work on the project with me, they now will have a whole library of articles to understand exactly what is going on!
Documentation your Expertise
Having a little piece of the internet dedicated to putting everything you know has many benefits. First off it will help you move forward in your career. This is because it is difficult to communicate your particular expertise or full knowledge of a topic in an interview or when you first meet someone, but, if you direct them towards your blog, they can literally read everything you know. Second, the more posts you write the more internet presence and reach you will have. This allows you to be discovered by others and increase your networking sphere. Lastly, if you are looking to put yourself forward in your career I would recommend creating a blog of a very specific topic. This allows you to become an “expert” in a very specific field and essentially put you in a position where you are a valuable asset to any team since you have your specialization that others on the team will most likely not have.
Finding your Niche
If you are currently in a position, as I am, where you are still deciding for yourself what particular field of your industry you would like to get into. Start a blog. The reason I say this is because you are not going to know what you really enjoy doing unless you try doing something. That might seem obvious, but so many people will talk about industries they want to get into and never really get their feet wet. My philosophy with this is if you are not sure about what you want to do, find something that you think you might be interested in and attack it full force. It might not work out to be your favorite topic, but at least you know that for sure after trying and you can always pivot, starting the cycle over again until you find your niche. This is what I experienced when starting my blog talkmobiledev.com. I was a little interested in mobile development, so I decided to start a blog and take courses to learn about it. After six months of mobile development I realized it wasn’t for me and I am happy I dove into that world to understand a little bit of what it is like.
Building the Habit
The hardest part in the beginning is to build the habit of writing your post every week. I recommend setting specific uninterrupted times where you will work on the blog and be dedicated to always using that time wisely. The more you hit that weekly deadline the longer streak you will have and there will be more pressure to not break the streak!
Written by Thomas Oropeza,
