Writing Online as a Way To Learn DevOps

In this article, I want to talk about a rather unusual way to dramatically improve your learning results.

You need to write online.

When you are writing a technical manual for other people, you have no choice, you need to learn the subject of your article very well.

Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

Before I began writing online, I primarily created manuals and tutorials for our DevOps team. During that time, I learned two amazing facts about writing technical guides.

First, when you write a technical manual, you obviously need to know the subject you are writing about very well.
You have to know the small technical details, and, which is more important, you have to understand them at a low level.

The second fact is that it doesn’t matter how small the topic you are writing about, you always dig deeper. Much deeper.

For example, you decided to learn about TCP:
“One of the main communication protocols of the IP suite, TCP resides at the transport layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. It works with the IP, which defines how computers send packets of data to each other.”

As you see, in order to learn about TCP, you at least need to know what IP, OSI, and packets are. In order to learn about IP, you at least need to know what hosts, switches, and routers are. The process is never-ending.

There is a difference in approach between when you learn something for yourself and when you teach others.

When you write some educational material for other people, your article can reach hundreds or thousands of people.
This is why you are more responsible about what you write.

This is why you need to read an impressive amount of documentation and practice a lot before you start writing an article.

Let’s say you want to write a specific Docker-related article.

In order to do that, first you need to read Docker documentation, ask questions, and make remarks. Then you need to practice, make mistakes, solve issues, and gain experience.

If you did it right, you will have more questions than answers about the Docker. That’s what I mean by digging deeper.

Specific topics lead to other topics, and so on and on. This is how you dig deeper.

This is how you learn through writing.

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