Invest In Blogging

Posted on June 7, 2019  •  5 minutes  • 927 words

We often have a lot to share with people, this could be our learnings, our opinions and our experiences. There are times when we feel the need to get our ideas validated or get feedback from people. These are definitely some of the reasons to invest in blogging and connect with community.

Let’s see some reasons for investing in writing blogs.

Help people learn from your learning journey

There are times when we often feel “it would have been great if someone had written an article to explain a concept”, start writing if you have had this feeling.

Learning is like climbing a rock. While climbing, we always look at the tip of the rock just to realize it is too far away. What is also important is to realize that there are people who might have just started this journey and your “learning journey” could go a long way in helping them.

Help people learn from your mistakes

Share your mistakes with the community. We as a community learn from each other’s mistakes and experiences and these things are really valuable.

Your blog on “Failing with Microservices” could help me in avoiding some mistakes or at least rethink my design if I am starting with microservices.

Get feedback from community

There are a lot of things which help us grow as an individual and one of them is feedback or I should say “Constructive Feedback”. Write to get feedback from community, to get their thoughts, to hear their experiences and to learn from all of these. Let’s see how this could work.

Say, I am very excited to use Coroutines to build reactive streams in my next project and I share an article “Being Reactive with Kotlin Coroutines” which talks about the basics of Coroutines and abstractions like “Channel” to implement reactive streams.

This article receives a lot of feedback and one of the feedback says -

Hey, nicely put. I would suggest you to check this link. It says - “There is no way to receive the elements from a channel again. The channel is closed when the producer coroutine is over and the attempt to receive from it again cannot receive anything." You might also want to take a look at kotlinx-coroutines-rx2.

Now, this is important as it helps me understand a lot of dimensions including backpressure, hot and cold observables which I had not considered. Thanks to the feedback, I got pointed in the right direction.

. . .

Investment is tricky and one expects a return from every investment. Let’s see the overall “return over investment” in blogging.

Solidifies your understanding

Like we learn when we teach people, we also learn when we share our ideas with people. Blogging helps in solidifying our understanding and the reason I say this is -

We try to communicate our ideas in the simplest possible manner to our readers. In order to do this, we choose to take small steps and each of these steps is well thought of and analyzed. Each step in turn teaches us something which improves our understanding.

We were talking about DSLs in Kotlin in one of the workshops, and I happened to like the way that topic was built - from lambdas to extension function to lambdas with receiver to invoke function.

I decided to share the same in an article Kotlin DSLs: The Basics and if I look back, I realize these two things - a workshop and an article have really helped me understand Kotlin DSLs well.

Increases your confidence

You are not afraid of reaching out to people, and you are not the same person you used to be who would think “should I share this, people would already know it”, “this tech was released 5 years back and I am writing about it now, does it make sense?”. You become someone who would share his/her ideas with confidence.

Challenges you to write better every time

You challenge yourself to write better every time. You tend to experiment with different styles of writing in an attempt to communicate your ideas clearly and connect with people better.

Makes you a better articulator of thoughts

You tend to wear a writer’s hat every time you sit to share something. An attempt is made is to talk to the readers through your article which acts like a story. You read your article hundreds of times in an attempt to articulate better. All this does is make you a better articulator of thoughts.

Builds your network

Investment in blogging is a great way to build network, you get to know people and people get to know you.

Networking is very powerful and truly magical, it can surprise you with a lot of opportunities which you might not imagine. You might get to speak at conferences, work with people that you follow and many more.

Investment in blogging is really a simple way to build network !!

Builds your brand

Investment in blogging acts as a great tool to build your and your organization’s brand.

“Return over investment in blogging” looks promising, but we need to be aware of the fact that a return might not be immediate for an investment.

Making an investment is the first step and usually the most difficult step, rest is all about return :)

Take your first step with blogging, share your ideas / opinions / thoughts with the community. It is a great tool which does a lot of magic, has got great return and more importantly “it is fun”.

Invest in blogging.

Summary