Why write technical blog posts Part 1

Technical blogs help to:

• Record and speed-up the process of learning a new topic.
• Can be used as learning devices. 
• Provide a useful format for note-taking as you learn new things.
• Sharing and growing knowledge with others.
• Provide invaluable feedback necessary for your own growth.
• Capture the essence of what you learned during research

Technical blogs should evolve from one-liners to concise researched posts.
They should act as brain-dumps of all your research.

Research is a frightfully expensive activity with loads of context building up as you search.
What happens after to all this invaluable context after you spend a week or more researching it?
It evaporates within days of research as you move on to other things.


The beginners mind full of questions is an invaluable resource.
Unfortunately it's impossible to retain as you learn more and more!!


Slowly the questions give way to answers...
Only for more questions to pop-up... with answers following slowly.
The mystery thickens fast as you try to satisfy your quest for understanding.

Researching, reading books, articles, blogs that you browse on the Net, experimenting, theorising, modelling.
All these go into the steaming cauldron of your quest....

Slowly the mists part to slowly yield insights into what makes the thing tick!!


Writing and Revising your blogs is a definite way to nurture and match this process of  growth.
The very process of writing simply and clearly forces you to seek out the core of the concept.
This is THE most valuable gift to the technical blogger - fuelling his own growth while helping others on the path.

Innocence yielding to Experience yielding (very) slowly to Mastery.



Not only does it capture the questions and answers you found.
It can very easily form the basis for helping out someone on the same path.

All this started when one of my friends mailed me asking me how come I was suddenly referring to so many books and all suddenly?
I realised that the actual query was more like: 
1) Why are you writing so many Tech-Info posts all of a sudden?
2) Whats with the constant chanting of "Apprenticeship Patterns" mantra?


By the way for those who are new to this stuff:
Apprenticeship Patterns is a print/online book which describes the long journey of a Master Craftsman.
The Looong journey from Apprentice to JourneyMan to Master.


One of the activities of a good apprentice is to "Construct Your Curriculum", This involves the related patterns

• Build up a Reading List over time
• Study the Classics:
• Dig Deeper 
• Record What You Learn
• Share What You Learn (hence these blog posts)

It is not humanly possible to read ALL these books in such a short time esp. as they're meant to be reflected upon and applied to your specific situation.

This is just compiling a Reading List. Filtering into a Classics-only list will have to wait a few days.

These posts are just for future use (Record What You Learn).
And maybe a resource for like-minded people out there.
People with the same problems, questions and wanting answers from the masters of the programming world.

Actually I'd found these books about 2 years back but only had a mental todo book list.
It's too much "wasted-time and effort"..... UNLESS it saves you time and effort in the long run.