The Ur-question of Blogging

Until my couple of recent posts, it had been a long while since I had posted anything. There were good reasons for this... and bad reasons.

The good reasons are pretty standard issue. In mid 2017, I started a new job, had a baby, and moved to a new country within a few weeks. Between all those things going on all at once it was tough to make the time and spend the energy on writing very many substantive things, and I had sort of painted myself into a bit of a corner with the maximalist approach to post writing that I had been cultivating. I could have, should have found a path towards a more sustainable way of writing, but that too, would have required focus and energy that was in dramatically shorter supply all of a sudden.

Among the bad reasons... I started to doubt my voice. It was easy to keep a beginners mind when I was actually a beginner. When I moved into my second programming job it didn't feel genuine to think of myself that way anymore, and yet... I didn't feel like I had achieved anything approaching the level of skill I felt was necessary to speak with authority, either. A little bit of an uncanny valley, that.

But some things have changed. I've grown a lot professionally and feel more secure in my skills and interests. My kid is nearing 5... still a huge handful but life is also (relatively) more predictable. I have been wanting to get back to writing...but there's one more obstacle left. I need to answer The Question first, if only for my own benefit.

Why write a blog?

Every time I sit down to start up with writing again, I'm faced with this, the ur-question of blogging. I've punted previously, but that was as much or more out of cowardice and confusion than enlightenment. "Why write a blog" is a fair question and it deserves to be answered in earnest. What is the benefit of this? Blogging can be a lot of hard work, especially if you want to do it well. What do I get out of this? What do other people get out of this? Is it even worth the time and effort? The reasons presented below are some things I'm thinking about. They mostly aren't general although some of them might apply kind of generally, but I'm only speaking for myself.

1. Blogging helps me learn

The most salient benefit I've experienced from blogging about things I'm learning is that it dramatically helps me with that learning. It gives me a framework to hang my self-assessment on. Do I understand $thing well enough to explain it to an imaginary reader who roughly mirrors who I was just before I learned about $thing? This can be very different than just feeling like you understand something... and it can be a lot more in depth. Further, it gives me a goalpost that isn't "I fully completely 100 percent understand $thing." In a vacuum, that's always going to be my goalpost, because I am a deluded completionist who would rather not try to learn anything at all unless I'm going to make it through the equivalent of an undergraduate courseload on it. I have actually tried to do this several times, imagining that I will take all the courses on MIT open courseware to achieve some kind of enlightenment. It never works, for various reasons, and I always feel bad when I fail to achieve this overly ambitious thing. If I ever did manage to do that, sure, I'd probably get a lot out of it, but there's also just no way it's the best use of my time at this point in my life and career.

The Mandelwat Set is maybe my great success in this vein. I have a lackluster math background, but I just got an itch to understand fractals a few years ago and spent a little over a month studying the basics and implementing a mandelbrot set viewer from scratch. The post covered all the basic maths, and included a lot of interesting javascript learnings too. I'm really proud of it, and it gave me something to point to, for myself, that says "hey this reflects that work and understanding I put into that little flight of fancy a few years ago." If I hadn't written the blog post, I would probably not have implemented the actual code, or if I had, I wouldn't have done so to completion. I would have been left with a vague memory of how the mandelbrot set works and ever present guilt that I don't know more, and that's all.

It's really pretty productive to write a medium length post about some subject you're learning about even if you only really intend it to benefit your own memory.

2. Blogging helps other people learn

Blogging about something you just learned helps other people learn the things you just learned. This is so simple as to be almost axiomatic, but it's really powerful. Important to this point is that you are best positioned to explain something to someone directly after you've learned it. You just went through the process! You know what you struggled with and what might be hard. After you've fully internalized something, it can become difficult to maintain empathy for fresh eyes. I can see this in action looking through my drafts folder. There are a few posts that are all about something I was into tangentially for a few weeks years ago, and though I may still find the subject interesting, I'm not sure I find it interesting enough to get back into it and finish the post. This is a good learning- when a draft is about something specific like that, just get it out the door. Some ideas can simmer for years and be better for it, but for devlog-like posts, they're not going to be engaging to write forever, and it's not worth working on them if I'm not engaged in the process.

3. I have a lot more to offer now than I did before.

I have 8 years of industry experience at this point. It's simply not accurate to call myself a beginner, even though I feel like one every day. That's one of the reasons I love this job, right? It's always providing new challenges and things to learn about? I'm still lucky enough to be working with absolute units who I continue to learn from, but that doesn't mean I don't have a LOT more to offer people who aren't as far along in their journeys as I am. Does this mean I should pivot my writing voice to an authoritative one? No, but I shouldn't take my own experience for granted, either. I genuinely love teaching people stuff that I know about, and I should do that. This blog can help do that.

In my opinion, as a reader, some of the most interesting things about blogs are subtle, and implicit. It's about learning the solving processes people use to attack problems and structure solutions. It's about articulating the tradeoffs in code design that come into play when working on something. Style guides and rules are never the whole picture- everything deserves to be thought through and the trade offs enumerated. How modular does this project need to be? Is it going to be distributed to other people? This becomes second nature pretty quickly when working in a job or doing personal or open source projects of any depth, but it's also quite mysterious from the outside in. I remember it seeming mysterious.

4. It's really fun and satisfying.

I can do whatever I want on here. Deciding what that's going to be is is a real challenge sometimes, but once I've made a decision to write a certain thing a certain way, I can just do it! It's fun to exercise my creativity in this completely self directed but contained way, and I've read a lot of interesting posts the last couple years that use novel presentation techniques that I find inspiring and want to emulate. This has so far primarily been a static words blog, but the web is so much more rich as an interactive platform, and I want to explore that.

It's also very satisfying to feel like I'm able to reify my understanding into something tangible, and to look back on how far I've come and how much I've grown over the years. I expect this to only be more true as the years progress, and the blog becomes a collection of snapshots of my previous minds.

I hope this answers The Question, and I'm looking forward to publishing more and more often.