In a similar vein, I find trying to explain something to someone gives you a good feel for how well you understand it. Often I find that I don't understand things as well as I thought after such an exercise.
Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
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Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#52In a similar vein, I find trying to explain something to someone gives you a good feel for how well you understand it. Often I find that I don't understand things as well as I thought after such an exercise.
Yep, only when you try to teach someone do you really understand something.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#53I'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 had a blog for awhile (on blogger lol), and a number of posts on early iOS programming. Some posts had a lot of hits and positive comments. The problem was that every post took me forever. I was so worried about having even a minor error that the stress caused me to stop.
I'm older now and care less about what people think and have more wisdom that the vast majority don't care about what I think, so maybe I'll start up again. It would be fun to share my ~25 years of tech stories and experience for at least myself.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#54I'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.
A workable trick is to write smaller blog posts, come back and add/edit later ;)
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#55I dunno how prevalent this saying is, but I’ve heard medical students talk about “watch one, do one, teach one” as the best path to really solidly learning a Procedure. Writing about something is ostensibly teaching. I’ve adopted it, particularly with the robotics team I mentor, and it striking how well it works.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#56I 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.
Wow, that's actually deeper than it sounds. I do wonder though: did a lot of famous scientists (like Einstein, Feynman, Turing, etc) use writing as a vehicle for learning?
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#57I'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’ve had similar issues and recently made a big step forward by doing one thing: I publish my posts but don’t list them and block search engines from scraping /posts via robots.txt. It’s not a safe way to hide content by any means, but is just enough to stop myself from worrying about what others still think about my writing. I can still share links with individuals if I want. I have been trying to get myself to writ…
I write a lot but don't publish anything anywhere. It's kind of like that bo burnham song "look who's inside again". I feel like when I share anything I think, no matter how revised, detailed or not, whatever advice followed, all I find is "another reason to hide again". feeling like having too much to say is a lot like having nothing at all to say in that it amounts to the same thing.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Read the first couple of posts and found them very insightful. Thank you for leaving them public.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#59Don’t write about it; use it. The real world application of a new skill fleshes out your understanding in a way that is less vulnerable to your own blind spots, is absorbed at a pre-lingual level (closer to your bare metal), and might actually produce something of value along the way.
Re: Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Tweets get published, your posts are long enough.