Why you should consider Blogging

Why you should consider Blogging

Admin aaSunday, April 26, 2020

That's not the first time I write about writing. I recommend logging to Several friends of mine, not only because they are studying and doing interesting but because they experience matter. In my previous post about writing, I was explaining why blogging is super important for remote work and learning. There is a great relation with Blogging and Remote work with I capture here and here.  However, for this blog post, I want to capture other aspects that go beyond the basic reasons like Marketing and Personal-brand. So why you should consider blogging? There are lots of good compelling reasons for it. So Let's get started!


Sharing is Caring

Let me tell you one secret. Just because 10 and 10 years things change completely with new languages, technologies, and approaches it does it mean its the principles, and the basics are throw away completely. So There is lots of repetitions. Because at the end of the day it does not matter much the language, the company but the problems are all kinds of similar.  So blogging will help you in the future, you can bet on that. Life is dynamic so you might change job and capturing some earnings are really important for several reasons like - remember what you did on the past and also compare what you would do now, this is a great source of learning.

DevOps has several empathy approaches like ICE and CALMS. Which are about learning and sharing. Agile and Lean are about effective Learning. So Sharing is about doing proper Lean, Agile, and DevOps. So Yeah having a blog will hap with that, and will help your organization. Like Steve Jobs said once, Best ideas need to win.  How can you transform your company nobody knows what to do, so the good words need to be spread. 

Lots of engineers, I included, often feel something we call: "Impost Syndrome" which is supernormal, where you basically feel like a fraud, like not being good enough. So I guess the first feeling is always, I'm not good enough or I dont have cool stuff to say. You will be surprised IF I say to you that some of my big hits as posts are the ones more simple that I asked people OH you like that one but there is nothing special there.  Do not think just because you did not create a language or framework or are working with a Facebook scale that you dont have interesting experiences that can help people.

Thinking/Learning is not Linear

This is another reason why you should start blogging. See a video is not enough. Do a Udemy course is not enough. I dont know you, but I just feel I know something when I explain to someone and is clear and concise, them I know that I know.

Sometimes and often times this is a messy process, learning and thinking are not something linear. You read something, See a video, get practice, talk to others, and after some time you deeply get it. Writing helps to get things faster at least for me I think writing.

There are always corner cases and design flaws which are much, much easier to get spotted when you put this on "paper". But why should I blog about something I'm not sure, well in order to get sure. If you are learning how to swim and you stop trying because you know how to swim you might never learn it. I deeply believe if we suck in something you need to increase the practice and the frequency.

Self-Development: Face it out - Taking the bull by the horn

That's might be another block. I'm afraid people mock me or it's not good enough. Well, I will say comments are evil, just remove comments and you will be fine. Removing comments it does not mean people won't talk with you, it does not mean I dont want feedback, it just means you dont want trolls. I have strong opinions and I'm a very passionate person however I avoid as much as I can to have Flamewar discussions. So of the subjects, I cover often are HOT TOPIC issues and I try to do it in a balanced professional way but eventually, someone will not like it, Well people need to have the maturity, I can be responsible for lack of maturity from people, neither should you, so go there and write your stuff.

As scary at could look, sharing a blog post is like that 3s of adrenaline but as time pass you will see is no big deal. Sharing a post it does not mean thats your FOREVER opinion, only is your current thoughts and experiences which could change and are fine. 

Writing improves your communications skills, In order to be an effective architect / Leader you need to have good communications skills, writing will help you a lot. You want to learn English? Another reason why writing will help you out.  So don't be afraid, don't overthink, just start blogging today and as the time pass, you will see it will help you a lot.

Remember all great inventors used to have a personal journal, like a diary, I'm sure they would have a blog if was today times :D

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco

Why Writing Matters

Why Writing Matters

Admin aaSunday, January 5, 2020

As Software Engineers we write code all day long(when we are not into meetings). Writing is how we get things done, shape the world with better solutions. Writing is old around ~3K BC, Egypt's believed knowledge was power. I believe writing can go way beyond expressing the current knowledge but also helps to shape future knowledge. Writing is not made only for journalists, teachers, and historians like I said engineers write a lot. For the last +10 years, Agile Software development becomes mainstream and it's very often to get teams with anti-writing feeling. Writing can be expressed in several different ways: Code, Design, Architecture, UX Personas, Ux Research, Business Rule, User Story, Use Case, Blog Post, Code Review, Documentation. Almost everything is related to writing.

Why Writing Matters

I write a lot. Not only on my blog but also in Moleskine(micro notebooks, which are not monolith notebooks), Evernote, Github Gists and Log Book. Writing allow me to remember things easily and ultimately writing helps me to think. I think better when I write about something, I got insights and I have the change to share with others some ideas, insights, information like we say in DevOps(Sharing is Caring).

Writing improve your communication skills by forcing you to be as much clear, precise and direct as possible. I deeply believe is there is something you do it poorly let's say swim. You will only get better is you swim a lot. So basically you must increase the frequency of anything that you want to improve. Writing more often will make improve you thinking and comunication soon. Writing goes side by side with reading, I read a lot: Books, Kindle, Posts, Blogs, etc...

Writing is Essential in Remote Work

In order to remote work function properly it's really important to do fewer meetings. Meetings don't scale, writing does. Let's say you will write a blog post explaining why ORM(Hibernate) sucks and why people should not it at all. If you took the meeting approach, you will need to have several meeting, let say you work with 100 people, you cannot add 100 people in regular web communication tools like skype/hangouts because often the limit is around 20-30 people. So you will need to do 4-5 meetings to cover your ground but them your company grows and now there are 200 people are you gonna do 5 meetings again? Now let's imagine you have more matters to discuss and letś say you have at least 20 topics to share in your company/product. Well, the meetings approach will not work at all. Writing, you do it once and you can share forever. Writing also enable async work so people can read at different times and you can be doing something else. So Writing scales, meetings dont. You can mix writing with videos for instance. For an internal or external blog post, you can have text + video and the combination is extremely powerful.

Sharing Context and Learning

Engineering means Tradeoffs and Decisions(Requirements). People often don't understand the rationale behind a tool, a vendor, a platform tech decision like use Scala. Writing gives you a chance to explain this Tradeoffs/Decisions to a broader audience and make people more comfortable and unboarded with you. It's all about context, some people have it, others don't. Everybody in your company/product should have as much context as possible. Writing helps a lot with it. Having the same context, alignment can arise and better decisions can be made. I believe you only know something let's say Lean if you can explaining. Having a blog and writing helps you to understand things better and explaining a teaching others allow you to learn and retain more learning.




I found that writing improves my presentation skills which is another great reason for you to start writing. Writing makes easier to remember things. Writing also make you Coach life easier since is easy to get visibility and grasp what you learned.

Learning with Others...

There are plenty of cool and awesome companies. I personally admire a lot Amazon, Netflix, 37 Signals and Google. All these companies write a lot, people from these companies also write a lot. You should have your blog and share your experiences and insights which might have a huge value for others, more than you think. I was in Portland/Oregon November 2019 having beers with some friends and I friend of mine was talking about Hardware Bugs, it blew my mind. I work with software for more than +15, but I never worked with hardware, it's way different than cloud or anything I'm used to it. After more beers we got into the blogging matter, he said to me that for him blogging would not make much sense because he was afraid that he could not make impact in people. I had to disagree(I wish my friend start blogging :D) something insights and learnings can come from the smallest things in the world. Something silly and simple as writing. :D

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco