Kristina Thai wrote Become a Better Engineer Through Writing, and I felt she has made a good case on why we should all write.
To be a good developer, there are some soft skills:
- Communicates Well
- Passion for learning
- Able to teach/mentor
Quoting from Shubhro Saha:
Code and essays have a lot more in common. The product is a sequence of logical statements, bundled into modular units– whether it be functions or paragraphs.
Like good prose, good code is concise.
Bad code wastes CPU cycles; bad essays waste brain cycles.
There are 3 main channels where we could write:
- Private journal
- Public blog
- StackOverflow
Why did I write this blog?
Here (samwize.com) is my public blog for my technical writing.
But long before I started blogging, I have already been keeping a private journal, documenting the technical challenges I faced, the new things I learnt, the “cheatsheets” I need to refer to frequently, etc.
It was until 2006 (10 years ago!), that I begun writing on a public blog.
I started blogging on my work with J2ME development (those were the days)!
I don’t have reason to write a public blog at first, but now I am glad for these reasons:
Always be a student - keep learning.
Always be a teacher - help others and become even better.