Deciding to write a coding blog... Should I?

A New Beginning

As all coders out there, we all have a beginning. Each of us has different motivation - excitement, finances offered, popularity, trendsetters - to keep us sane in coding, for any kind of coding. For enthusiast coders, they joined the communities, either local or global, to catch up with current trends and best practices. We keep improving ourselves by catching up learning new technology, and keep building things.

As we progress learning to code, we have to learn different theories, concepts, paradigms, mental modals, etc. to improve how we perceive the best way of coding. Then, there are a lot of things we need to remember, though there are a lot of cheat sheets out there to help you. So, how do you keep track of things that you have learn till now?

Keep everything tracked

It is not about your ability to catch up things, but a matter of time it takes until you forgot one specific thing when you didn't use that for a long time. It is better, of course, if you keep practice and build things using whatever you learn, but imagine how those knowledges can also benefit you in term of self-retrospection and keep track of your learning path for others to learn as well.

I believe, most of coders keep track of these things somewhere. Journals, personal site, notes, diaries, or somewhere in your IDE. People records their journey summary of code learning, and start modifying or appending a better way as soon as they find out a better way of doing things, so later on they can look back and wondering how they grow as they move forward.

Time to put it online!

Every knowledge is a jewellery. Thus, I believe that part of those knowledges should be put online, so anyone can benefit from them as well. So, articles and podcasts can be a way of you to share your knowledge and opinions on anything you are working on. There are tons of channels you can share, such as DEV.to, Medium for articles (you can also use your own, like Hashnode), and lots of podcast channels you can discover, like Developer Tea or Full Stack Radio. You can also use microblogging approach like Twitter, as long as you share and gather input and feedback on others, so you can share and learn at the same time.

But here's the question. There are a lot of coding articles out there, even in DEV.to, where the masters, the mythical 10X Developer creatures put their articles as well. You might think that your articles didn't really bring an impact, in addition that you might make a mistake somewhere in your article. Other factors such as language boundaries, makes you a bit unmotivated to produce articles.

Just Do It!

Remember this. Writing article is not about you flexing, telling people "Hey! I follow the latest trend, just released a minute ago!", or flexing how powerful you are. There are tons of coders like you, who is still confused and try to figure out the solution which you just discovered. I know, people will still go to Stack Overflow and then go for the first one (pssst, the experienced one didn't really go for the first 😂), and just go with it, right?

Here's the thing. Forums and articles have different formats. While forums are used for discussion and seeking for solution, articles are more structured and focused more on sharing a chunk of solution. And of course, when you write an article, you will think about how you want to put it in sequence, layout your content, think about languages that you will use, and et cetera. Along that process, you are actually polishing your knowledge, filtering what really matters to the solution you suggested, improving your methodology, and deliver your solution, while you learn yet another knowledge because you will do some research to make sure your articles is properly written.

For language barrier thing. Treat it as a way you want to improve your writing skills. It might look scattered for the first time, but believe me, it will get better in each article. My primary language is Malay Language, and I still use this platform to improve my English (so, if you noticed a grammatical error here and there, I humbly sorry 🤣🙇‍♂️).

Just write it! I am just 2-year-old in programming world (as far as I am active in industry, learnt coding long before). I believe my writing will help someone out there, adding a small impact to someone's live. Keep hustling, and learn!

Peace be upon ya!