I don't write this blog in hopes that it will get a lot of traction. I don't market it, I don't try to optimize it for SEO and I I don't even tell my friends and coworkers about it. Although I would of course be delighted to hear someone who found something useful in my blog, I really write it for myself. And what could I possibly get out of that? Glad you asked.

Expressing thoughts and ideas is hard

I'm a software engineer. My job is mostly about coming up with neat solutions to tricky problems. Coming up with the solution in my head is however just part of the fight as I also need to be able to concisely express the ideas to my colleagues. Even harder is to convey the heart of a technical problem or solution to a non-technical person, which happens more often than you might think. For example, a manager might come around and inquire about why something still isn't working as it should or why project X got so expensive.

Writing a technical blog about helps me practice this skill. I put quite a bit of care into most blog posts I write and I also often look back at earlier posts to consider how I can improve the writing.

Retaining knowledge is also hard

Another reason for why I write this blog is to retain knowledge. Writing about something you've just learned is a great way to further cement that knowledge. As I put a large amount of care into my posts and want to be sure that I get things right, I also often pick up bits and pieces that I missed when attaining the knowledge I'm writing about.

As I noted in the post about my new Wiki, my strive toward high quality posts does unfortunately mean that I don't publish blog posts all that often. That's where the Wiki comes in. In there I simply write things down without any particular care about quality. I can thereby help myself retain knowledge about things that I don't yet understand well enough to write a blog post about, or that I simply don't have the time to write about.

Putting yourself out there is perhaps even harder

Exposing your work to the public is not something most people are comfortable with. It's easy to feel self-conscious about the things you create and be afraid of potential backlash or negative feedback. Putting up blog posts strengthens my confidence when it comes to communicating and expressing myself, even if I don't typically get any direct feedback (be that positive or negative) due to not having comments on this site. Similarly, putting up my projects on GitHub strengthens my confidence in my technical skills.

Having published my work for many years I now feel little to no anxiety about publishing my work. Rather, I find it enjoyable to put something out in the open where others may find it, even if few ever do.