Invest In Blogging

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

Let's see some reasons for investing your time in writing blog posts.

Help People Learn From Your Journey

When we're learning a new skill, there are often times when we feel "it would have been great if someone had written an article to explain a concept." If you have had this feeling, start writing.

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. 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. These opportunities 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 just starting out with microservices.

Get Feedback From Your 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.

Let's say I am very excited to use coroutines to build reactive streams in my next project, and I share an article called Being Reactive with Kotlin Coroutines. It talks about the basics of coroutines and abstractions like Channel to implement reactive streams.

This article receives a lot of feedback. One of the comments 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 and hot and cold observables, which I had not considered. Thanks to the feedback, I got pointed in the right direction.

Investing Your Time in Blogging

Investment is tricky, and one expects a return from every investment. Let's see the overall "return on 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. 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 a Kotlin workshop. 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 on DZone, Kotlin DSLs: The Basics. If I look back, I realize now that the workshop and the article have really helped me understand Kotlin DSLs well.

Increases Your Confidence

You are not afraid of reaching out to people. You are not the same person you used to be who would think "Should I share this? People would already know it" or "This tech was released 5 years back, and I am writing about it now — does that 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. You make an attempt to talk to your readers in your article and make it look like a story. You read your article hundreds of times in an attempt to articulate better. All this helps make you a better articulator of thoughts.

Builds Your Network

Investment in blogging is a great way to build a 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 that you might never have imagined. You might get to speak at conferences, work with people that you follow, and many more opportunities.

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

Builds Your Brand

Investment in blogging is a great tool to build your brand — and the brand of your organization.

The ROI for blogging looks promising, but we need to be aware that any return will not be immediate for an investment.

Making an investment is only the first step, and usually the most difficult step. The rest is all about return ;-)

Take your first step with blogging, and share your ideas/opinions/thoughts with the community. It is a great tool that can do a lot of magic and has a great return. More importantly, it's fun.   

Invest in blogging!