I've been blogging here for going on three years (man, has it been that long?) and it's been been pretty informative. So, since I'm in a bit of a nostalgic mood as the third anniversary approaches, I wanted to share some of my insights on blogging with my fellow progeeks.
I often advise people to try blogging – sure it's not for everyone, but I find it's very useful to pursue, because if it is for you, you'll gain a lot of benefits. So, don't take this as pressuring you towards blogging, but I want to share an interesting professional benefit about blogging as I do–on careers and so forth.
One of the benefits of blogging is that you learn something twice.
I've spent years here–and will spend many more years–trying to help out professional geeks, otaku, and people like well, us. This means I've distilled a lot of wisdom, ideas, research, rants, and so on down into various articles, posts, and series. Each time I've had to do this I had to review my lessons, think about them, go over them, and in a few cases even reconsider them.
Each time I posted something for you guys out there, I've re-learned it. Each blog post lets me see my advice anew. Each rant lets me understand my thought processes a bit more. Each series has forced me to classify my thoughts and ideas and organize them and explore them.
If you blog? You get the same benefit; you relearn the lessons you share.
This has been one really unexpected benefit of the blog, and one that I've really enjoyed. I've gotten better at what I do because I share what I do well with others – and have seen it and experienced my advice anew. It's been an amazing, and often humbling experience, because there's always something new to learn.
So you may want to give blogging – or something similar – a try. You'll not only share and communicate, you may find all your old knowledge is new again, and you'll learn a lot more from things you already learned.