Almost everyone today has a persona of themselves on at least one social account. If you are a software developer, you are already aware of the hundreds of avenues where you can showcase your programming talents and skills. There's linkedin for displaying your career profile to every recruiter out there, there's reddit and quora to share your knowledge of software and programming, stackoverflow for collecting some of those dev creds and topcoder/hackathons/conferences to prove your talent as a software developer. Why then, do you need a blog? In this article I'll share the pros of having a programming blog which will immediately motivate you to start one now.
- Having a personal blog is yet another way to build your personal brand online. You may already have accounts on various social media where devs hang out, but you are limited by their platform and restricted to their audience. If you own a blog instead, you completely own and design how your personal brand should look like.
- The more you practise blogging, the more you improve your writing skills. Writing skills are, in fact, a very valuable skill in a software developer's career. How many times have you given up in frustration trying to understand a piece of someone else's code because of poor commenting or lack of documentation? Writing a blog post regularly will definitely improve your communication skills, and you'll slowly develop a writing style of your own.
- Teaching someone else helps you to identify gaps in your own knowledge and can prove to be a great learning experience for you as well. When you teach a particular language or framework in a blog post to a global online audience, you are under more pressure to be as accurate as possible, and as a result, you seek out answers to questions you would have otherwise skipped. This is how writing a programming blog can help you cement your knowledge completely and fill in all the gaps in your skills.
- It takes you a step forward to becoming a well-rounded developer. As we just discussed, blogging not only helps you to improve your software development and programming skills, it also helps you to be better at communication. After just a new months of blogging you'll start noticing positive changes in your attitude towards your career - your tone becomes more professional when you speak, especially when you write.
- Your personal blog can go a great way into your career development. By having your blog in your resume, your potential employers and interviewers can quickly find out more about you and your work, which creates a strong impression on them. By having a programming blog you have already proven your mettle as a software developer and are already ahead of the crowd. The interviewer knows more about you and what he can expect from you, which makes it easier for both of you by speeding up the entire interviewing process.
- Blogging is a great way to network with other developers and software engineering recruiters. The higher the quality and quantity of your blog, the more visibility it gets and eventually piques the interest of influencers in your expertise or niche. As your blog gets more traction, you will start getting more backlinks to your website from other authority websites, people will start commenting on your posts, asking for more help or just admiring your expertise.
- Blogging can be fun too! Think of it as a cool side project for trying out new skills and networking with fellow developers from around the world. Simply dedicate half an hour to your blog, treating it as your career journal, voicing your opinions on the latest tech news, or trying out a new framework over the weekend.
- You learn another valuable skill by blogging - how to market yourself. The one sureshot way of growing your blog is by marketing it to the right audience. As you start gaining more visitors, you'll be intrigued to get more attention to your blog. In this process you'll learn all about SEO and different types of marketing which will help to grow not only your blog, but your persona as well.
- Your blog can be an outlet for your contribution to the domain of knowledge freely available on the internet. You never know which post of yours helped a frustrated software developer grappling with deadlines, or a newbie just starting out overwhelmed by the industry. You get good karma by helping out fellow developers and teaching your skills.
- If your blog is well known in the software community or whichever niche you are targeting, you might even get opportunities to speak at conferences and summits. After all, everyone loves a little bit of fame and getting some online recognition doesn't hurt!
- Lastly, your blog can be a gateway to a business opportunity. You can leverage your audience to market your services if you are a freelancer, or sell products such as a software you built or books and online tutorial courses you created. Do not create a blog just for the purpose of revenue generation, but try to provide value to your readers first.
Finally, my advice would be to just get started with your blog today - jot down 10 topics you would like to share this month, purchase a domain name and hosting space, or just fire up those github pages. Blogging is really easy - and after all, you are a software dev! Your personal blog or website can also be a place to showcase all your online portfolios together - your github stars, twitter followers, stackoverflow reputation, reddit karma (or maybe not), linkedin resume, topcoder badges... Be creative, come up with your own cool ideas on what you want the world to know about you. Once you have done this, share your blogs here in the comments section for others to see as well!
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Saturday, 14 October 2017
