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Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

addyosmani.com

41–50 of 167 posts

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#41
post #39

The hardest class, in terms of failure rates, in first year CS in my university was Discrete Mathematics. I got an A- and was pretty proud of myself. In third year, I became a TA for the course, marking assignments and hosting tutoring office hours. That's when I discovered that apparently I had learned nothing when I got that A-. Teaching a subject requires you to actually understand it, and not just know enough to…

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Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#42
post #21
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem will be a useful differentiator to other tech blogs.

Depth. Depth would be a useful differentiator. I need a few thousand words that actually teach me something, not three paragraphs that vaguely gesture in the direction of an idea.

THIS. My favorite example is Jeremy Cole’s blog [0], especially the stuff on InnoDB. You want to take a deep dive into the murky internals of MySQL? This is it. Tons of other stuff as well, but those are my favorite. He wrote tooling to visualize .ibd files FFS.

[0]: https://blog.jcole.us/

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#43
most of the benefits of writing are pretty clear to me but I'm still unable to improve the efficiency of writing i.e ability to put down thoughts properly and quickly rather than spending a lot of time on structuring the blog, very rarely it feels like english knowledge is the bottleneck

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#44
post #13
post #7

I've tried to create a tech blog for a long time. But because I'm quite OCD about my writing, it took ages to create a post. In the end, writing became such a chore that I stopped altogether.

Same. I want to limit myself to creating posts that are 2 or 3 paragraphs long, but I find that when I start, I expand and clarify so much it becomes another long post. I always need to have an entire free afternoon to write some prose.

Huh. I've always felt that my posts aren't big enough to warrant publishing. I've been working on a few posts for weeks now but it still feels like they're too insignificant to publish.

Are long posts frowned upon?

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#45
post #21
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem will be a useful differentiator to other tech blogs.

Depth. Depth would be a useful differentiator. I need a few thousand words that actually teach me something, not three paragraphs that vaguely gesture in the direction of an idea.

I agree. Depth creates much more evergreen content than just "news commentary" or similar.

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#46
post #7

I've tried to create a tech blog for a long time. But because I'm quite OCD about my writing, it took ages to create a post. In the end, writing became such a chore that I stopped altogether.

I have the same problem, but I also have a suggestion: write down the stuff just for yourself. Like personal notes. Don’t think about publishing it anywhere. For me, this works really well for learning purposes. Although I would also like to publish some stuff, some day, maybe…

I'd say that is mainly an issue with people, they think it needs to be published.

Writing becoming a chore is wrong use, because one should not write for "writing" and article we discuss here has nice points on practical use of writing for other means than simply "writing".

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#47
post #7

I've tried to create a tech blog for a long time. But because I'm quite OCD about my writing, it took ages to create a post. In the end, writing became such a chore that I stopped altogether.

My blocker was in infra shaming (from myself). I had started on WordPress years ago on a t3.micro instance, and all was well. Then I wanted to self-host since I have a substantial homelab and at the time, was an SRE. But I knew that my K8s (k3os technically) cluster wasn’t great, and I wasn’t using Helm correctly, and… all of this made me think I had to get everything perfect, exactly how I wanted it, before I could…

What made you stop fretting about that? Did you make the GH-hosted blog anonymous?

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#48
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My blocker was in infra shaming (from myself). I had started on WordPress years ago on a t3.micro instance, and all was well. Then I wanted to self-host since I have a substantial homelab and at the time, was an SRE. But I knew that my K8s (k3os technically) cluster wasn’t great, and I wasn’t using Helm correctly, and… all of this made me think I had to get everything perfect, exactly how I wanted it, before I could…

What made you stop fretting about that? Did you make the GH-hosted blog anonymous?

Nope - you’re welcome to see it if you’d like (but there’s a huge gap in content, the only new stuff isn’t pure tech, and I make no guarantees about the accuracy of the older content) - it’s my username.dev

It was purely self-loathing/projection (idk, not a psychologist), where I was convinced that if _I_ thought my setup was bad, then surely others would judge me and ignore the content as well. I have no idea how I snapped out of that absurd belief, but I’m happy I did, because I really enjoy writing.

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#49
post #7

I've tried to create a tech blog for a long time. But because I'm quite OCD about my writing, it took ages to create a post. In the end, writing became such a chore that I stopped altogether.

I was like that, assuming people will just throw barrages of virtual tomatoes to my blog posts, then I read a quote from a famous writer: "Your first draft will always be bad. Just revise" (or something similar).

Then I started to write my drafts when inspiration hits without thinking and stopped the moment inspiration ran dry. Then revising/extending as I feel like it. I publish the post the moment it feels complete. The result is https://blog.bayindirh.io.

The gist is, I write about what I want, for myself. It's out there and available. I also submit to here and send to a couple of friends. If I get feedback, that's nice. Otherwise, eh.

Give it a try. There's no need to be blocking yourself out of something you might enjoy.

Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

#50
I remember an old PhD comics strip where a professor says “Remember kids, the only difference between fooling around and science is writing it down.”. In the context the goal was obviously for it to be funny but it is actually a very good and wise advice.
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