• 2020-04-01 08:17:33

Why should you start your own blog?

You decided you could share some knowledge, or(like me) learn even more by creating tutorials on things you just learned, tried and saw it works. That's also a great method to double-check your knowledge. In reality, it is not even double-check - it is triple, quadruple and so on because you don't want to share WRONG knowledge! You want the post you wrote to be 100% right in order not to mislead the reader.

“Those who know, do.
Those that understand, teach.”

Aristotle

"I am not sure I know it, let alone teach...?

You may say "But I'm not even sure if I know how to do the thing, let alone teach it...". I was also not really sure of my skills and abilities to share knowledge, especially in the IT world, where there are no 'relative' skills. You either do it, or you let somebody else do it while you learn it. Then again, even if your skills are not a good fit for a post - they will NEED to become great enough for an efficient one. This way, you are creating a challenge, and we all know challenges are great once completed!

 

Hard work

By starting a blog you are putting yourself in a position in which you need to work hard to keep it going. Well, if you want a blog sharing what you ate in the morning, or how great it is to 'get rich' from TikTok entrepreneurship... you can stop reading now - unfortunately I am not your guy =). However, if you are a motivated fella', you are most welcome to learn more about my structure and how I envision my blog.

I divided my workflow in 3 parts - Learn, Understand and Share. Keep in mind this can vary between posts. For example, if you decide to write about refresh rates of a monitor, I believe you will have to deep-dive more into theory and not practice. However, if you decide to write about how to set up a LAMP stack put Laravel project on top... well, you will have to do it yourself first, make sure you know each part of the process, and then you are free to write about it.

Find out more about my 3-step learn, understand and share method down below:

Learn.

Usually, each person's learning capabilities are different. I found a great post where you can find out more on how different learning techniques are structured. If you are interested - go check it out.

So how exactly do we learn something? I personally make the most use of social interactions(when I can interact with the teacher, double-checking my understanding) but any of the methods is helpful. Did you know that your brain is trainable? You can perform a variety of exercises for it to progress and become better. I usually look up the case I am about to study. For example, if I am watching a 30 minutes video on how to do something, I first go through it fast enough to know what's happening. This applies for reading as well. I will take a look at the tutorial's steps to understand the structure behind it. I would then google about the technology and make sure I understand the fundamentals behind it. Then I am free to continue with the 'real' understanding part.

Understand.

When I am done with the first part of my learning process I get into it. I start with the tutorial I choose. Make sure you follow only 1 tutorial before you start doing something because it can get real messy if you jump between tutorials as there could be different ways of doing the thing you are trying to accomplish.

So, I complete the tutorial and make sure I understand each part of it. For example, let's say I want to create a blog post on how to set up an Apache webserver and get an index.html page running. I will find the tutorial, I will do it on my own server(I am using DigitalOcean for a VM and I highly suggest it as it is really cheap and highly efficient) and research a bit more on what the Apache web server is, what is LAMP stack and so on.

This way when I complete the tutorial successfully, I acquire some good fundamental knowledge on what the technologies I used are and how they function. I am now ready to proceed to Step 3: Hardening and transforming my knowledge into a blog post.

Share!

Okay, I have completed the tutorial, I did some extensive research on the topic and I can explain it to somebody... or at least I think I can?

On many occasions, it turned out I don't actually understand the subject good enough for me to explain it to somebody. I thought I knew and understood something, but it turned out I was far from compiling it into structured, reasonable and clean sentences. This is why we have to go to step two and add some more 'DLCs'. In case this happens to me, I go back to the almighty indexing machine - Google. I open the tab of the tutorial and try to explain the stuff to me. When I am once again sure in my ability to recreate the knowledge into words - I feel confident enough to write a blog post. This is how I share my knowledge.

Conclusion

Okay, now you have an overview of how I am about to structure my blog and what techniques I am about to use. I would recommend starting your own blog, Reader! Why? Because it is a fun way to gain knowledge. Because it will give you a great sense of accomplishment. And last but not least - because it is something YOU did!

Author: Denislav Gavrilov