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Engineers Should Blog

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Re: Engineers Should Blog

#11

Post by JCDenton2052 »

No, every engineer should not blog. It is hard enough to find the right information when you have to shift through clickbait and the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.

If I was interested in assessing someone's caliber, I'd rather look at their Github than their blog. Anyone can write a blog post, not everyone can write good code.

Blog if you have some insight into technology that hasn't been already elucidated or if you disagree with what's out there.

Having said that, I plan to start my own blog at some point. What will I be writing about? I'll start with reviews of technical books. Why? Because I have read a couple since the beginning of the year that I was unhappy with and had to return, but bought them in the first place because other people said good things about them. Hopefully if someone in the future considers them they will come across my view and take it into consideration.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#12

Post by lossolo »

You should certainly blog if you did something different, something that is innovative, if you solved an interesting problem. But.. lets be honest, political correctness aside. Most software engineers have nothing to blog about, they just glue some libraries and make couple of db requests and that's about all they do. Nothing what they do is innovative or worth blogging about. Not every engineer should blog or we would see tens of thousands of new links everyday on HN that would point to another blog that writes about how someone wrote an api and did 3 mysql requests - That's called spam. We already have thousands of resources/articles/blog posts that solved those problems and unless you are bringing something new to the table, what you wrote was already written.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#14

Post by mgkimsal »

JCDenton2052 wrote: post #11

No, every engineer should not blog. It is hard enough to find the right information when you have to shift through clickbait and the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal. If I was interested in assessing someone's caliber, I'd rather look at their Github than their blog. Anyone can write a blog post, not everyone can write good code. Blog if you have some insight into technology that hasn't been already elucidated or if…

I don't particularly want everyone publishing code, really.

"not everyone can write good code"

Not everyone can tell what's good, what's not, and why.

And searching through 20x the amount of code now to find something that a) works, b) is documented, c) is kept up to date (and is also accurate/correct) - just gets harder the more 'stuff' gets published.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#15

Post by codr4life »

I find that blogging helps me untangle messy reasoning, to the point where I often end up improving the code to make it easier to explain. The marketing angle is less interesting to me, I'm not selling anything. What's missing from the article is the bigger perspective; by sharing ideas and knowledge openly, everyone wins.

https://github.com/codr4life/vicsydev

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#17

Post by ma2rten »

xiphias wrote: post #3

When I read ,,the only thing you need is an editor'', I thought how cool it would be if what I write would be reviewed by some people before going public...it would make me less shy about it. Then I realized he means a text editor (though he's an editor himself)

I used fiverr.com to proofread my CV, I think you could also ask them to check your blog posts.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#18

Post by donovanm »

Yeah I agree with this that most software engineers should consider this. It's another way to set yourself apart from the masses that most people will never put in the time and effort to do. The idea that other people put forward that you should only write about things if you think your ideas are innovative always seemed silly to me. A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and important information to someone else. Besides how are you supposed to know if what you're saying is 'innovative' before you say it and get feedback on it?

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#19

Post by kedean »

graeme wrote: post #10
PretzelFisch wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my biggest problem, how do you improve your written communication without an editor? You can do the same thing over and over and call it practice, but without a reviewer how will you magically improve this skill?

1. Post stuff for people to view. Pay attention to what is popular, and what isn't 2. Read stuff aloud before posting 3. Read widely, and pay attention to writing you like. I've built a business off of writing: https://lsathacks.com/explanations/ I got started by writing a travel blog during a yearlong trip. I posted each entry to Facebook. When an entry got a lot of comments/views, I could tell it was better. I also…

The problem doing that with technical writing is that your audience isn't going to be judging you on your writing skills, they'll be judging you on the technical content. OP isn't worried about their technical content, they're worried about their writing skills. The technical audience is going to be affected by writing skills (it'll affect how well points are made, etc), but they aren't going to give feedback on that part. "Just ship it" doesn't work with soft skills.

Re: Engineers Should Blog

#20

Post by pavfarb »

Engineers should blog publicly when they have something to say. Something useful for their colleagues. Engineers shouldn't waste time forcing themselves to blog instead of work just to push their career forward: frequently they just expose they don't have anything to say in extremely unreadable way. What a waste of time for everybody.

Soft skills helps you grow as an engineer, it's true, but I think it's important to understand that not every exercise should become a public material.

But, in a generation publishing their every 2nd gym workout on instagram, who am I kidding anyway.

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