There’s power in asking why. When you ask why, you can unearth the underlying purpose or reason for anything. The answer(s) to why also clarifies purpose, giving you solid foundations for decision-making.
Why have I decided to start a blog?
- To improve my technical communication skills.
- To help others solve problems easily.
- To help me in the future.
To Improve my Technical Communication Skills
I live among people, and to get my thoughts across to them, I have to communicate.
I’ve learnt from Will Sentance’s courses on Frontend Masters that technical communication skills is one of the essential skills of a software engineer. The ability to get others to understand (what my thoughts are about) a concept is a valuable skill in
- participating in code reviews,
- mentoring others,
- writing documentation and most importantly,
- writing clean, maintainable code.
Anyone who wants to get better at writing must write. Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics said:
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
To Help Others Solve Problems Easily
One of my favourite developers is Jon Skeet because of his efforts in helping others solve problems.
Although I don’t write Java or C#, it’s awesome that many people have been able to code easily and have a better understanding of these languages because Jon Skeet answered their questions on StackOverflow.
Out of gratitude for the value I have gotten from developers who have written articles that have helped me, I choose to contribute to helping others solve problems too. In the words of Victor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning,
I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful for people who are prone to despair.
If you take a look at the path of people who excel in their careers, you will find that they are always sharing what they have discovered with their community. It could be via content creation, research papers or public speaking. One way or another, they improve the knowledge base of their community through their contributions.
To Help me in the Future
More than once, I’ve heard developers talk about how many of their articles had helped them solve problems they had months after writing them. This is one source of motivation for me. It’s like saving for the rainy day.
If I understand something perfectly well today, I should keep a record of my thoughts and how I got to understand it while I still have the concept at the forefront of my mind.
I may not use what I understand well now so frequently that it becomes second nature to me, and because of that I may forget it. I should keep a record of my understanding for future me.
Diary Cartoon Illustration - People illustrations by Storyset