Comment by hlassiege

This post really resonates with me, especially points 1, 3, and 5. I started blogging in 2001. I have old articles lying around that are completely obsolete - about PEAR, Swing, GWT, Subversion, etc.

I did it to share without having any idea who was reading or not. Probably nobody back then.

But it became a habit. Beyond tech topics, I started blogging about broader subjects: organization, hiring, salaries, company building.

And it's incredible how much I relied on it later as a sort of documentation, especially for everything related to company building. It's so valuable to re-read why we made certain decisions in the past. And it's also so valuable to be able to point new colleagues to that knowledge base.

And technically, I had fun. I went through Joomla, self-hosted WordPress, wordpress.com. I built my own plugins. Then I developed my own open source static blog generator (bloggrify.com) in the Nuxt ecosystem. That's when I created an English version of my blog.

Then I started feeling the need to share differently. I had the impression that blogging was becoming outdated, that younger generations weren't reading anymore. So I tried video format on YouTube.

I really enjoyed video production - there's still so much to learn: equipment, techniques, new tools.

But I realized that each format has its pros and cons. It's so much easier to update text when it becomes obsolete. It's also so much faster to produce. Video is so hard to make. So I got back into writing and even took it further by creating a blogging platform (writizzy.com).

In short, I learned a lot because I documented everything I did, which forced me to dig deeper into each topic to avoid saying nonsense. I also learned a lot because I wanted to test approaches, make videos, learn to build a static site generator and many other things, purely for the sake of learning.

Today, one piece of advice I give to every senior dev is to take the time to write. Doesn't matter if it's to publish somewhere or not. But to lay out your ideas, dig deeper into them, get perspective.