Comment by Syonyk
> The second reason that I’ll write is to learn about something. It’s one thing to hand-wave one’s way through a presentation. It’s another to commit pen to paper (well, bytes to disk) and explain something. Quite often I’ll realise that there’s a gap—or gaps—in my knowledge that I need to explore first before I can properly write about something, and that’s the very reason that I do it.
This is a very good reason to write - I've learned about a ton of topics over the years at depths I wouldn't have bothered with if I weren't going to write blogposts about it. I really didn't need to spend a year chewing through other people's PhD work to understand some of the quirks of lead acid battery behavior I was seeing years back (Steve on IRC's description covered the details well enough to work around it), but if I was going to write it up[0], I wanted to actually understand it. And that took time.
But it misses one of the most important reasons I write: To force myself to finish projects and document things, so I can fully offload it from my brain.
I'm very prone to "90% done, eh, good enough, I'll finish it later..." sort of projects, and they take up a lot of mental space because I still have to (or, at least, try to...) remember state on the project. Before I write about something, I want it fully done, and then as part of writing it up, I trust myself to document anything weird, any odd findings, etc. Once I've done that, then I can entirely forget the details of the project, teardown, or whatever, knowing that if I need to do it again, I can go reference my old writeup and I'll know what I need to do!
Once written, I can just clear the brain-space out, and not worry about forgetting about it, because it's been written up, by me, in my style.
Also, copy editors and reviewers start to sound more like professional writing than "blogging," at least to me.
[0]: https://www.sevarg.net/2018/04/08/off-grid-rv-lead-acid-main...
As a reader, people writing to learn about something irritates me when it's not clearly flagged that the writer has almost zero experience using the thing they are writing about.
There's so many articles in tech where the writer probably has less experience with something than literally anyone who will read their post, and it means there's effectively a content farm of what a new software engineer will learn in their first few months (if not years) on the job, written by software engineers in their first few months, with effectively no net information.