Why I created my blog and why you should also create one
Hi everyone and welcome to the first post of my website.
I will start this post by providing first the reasons why I think any engineer should have its own blog and why I created mine.
After that I will provide some details on how I created this blog, and why I made such decision.
Contents
Quite often I was searching on the internet about particular solutions to different problems, and I came across to no solution.
After making a lot of research I was forced to get creative and provide solution myself. Most of the times I was proud of those solutions, but the problem was that those solutions were known only by me and probably someone else who also didn’t share!
I became aware of this only when I spoke with my other friends who were very interested and we had great discussions. This the first sign for me that I should share this knowledge in order to help more people, and also help myself to get even better by having constructive discussions and improving the given solutions.
2. Helps with better understanding and learning
To know something is totally different then to be able to explain or teach it to someone else. By putting your knowledge on paper, or trying to teach someone else you also learn how to express your ideas in a better way, and thus understanding better the concepts.
I would say that at times it is even more important being able to explain and teach others then knowing something. This is an invaluable skill for anyone, especially for top software engineers.
Lastly, it also forces you to use proper grammar as much as possible and also be sufficient. (Especially if you are a non native English speaker. If it is working for me, it will also for you ;))
3. Finding people with similar interests
A friend of mine had found two other skilled and passionate engineers about cryptography who were willing to work together for an interesting project.
I asked him how did he manage to find two other people of such skills and convince them to start something together without any payment.
His reply was “my blog”. Back then I got an “aha” moment and I realized that I also need to have a blog of my own.
Finding other engineers for starting interesting projects is extremely hard, so by creating a following of people with related interests and keeping them up to date the likelihood of finding such is dramatically more.
4. Keeping track of your own progress!
This may come as a surprise, but it is one great reason to keep a blog. For any knowledge that you gain, for any unsolved problem out there that you solve, for any book that you read and have some opinion about you may write a blog post.
This will help you look back and track your progress. Things that impressed you at a certain time will be part of your blog and will not be forgotten.
I have heard from many friends that many thoughts and opinions get lost without being written, so just do it!
And as the final advise, try to contribute only useful information. The internet is already full of information and we should try to contribute only knowledge that is not redundant.
Why WordPress ?
Yes, I used WordPress for creating this blog (as of July 2018 of this writing).
It was a real struggle for me to decide on the technology that would power my blog. As a software engineer that struggles to have perfection, I wanted to have a custom CMS written from scratch by myself. I was worried about security, performance, caching, design and anything you can image!
On the other side, a good engineer needs to consider if the investment is worth it and should not reinvent the wheel!
After thinking for a while I came to the conclusion to use WordPress as a start and switch to some custom solution only if I get enough visits to justify my added effort.
In the end of the day, what really matters are the content and the reasons above. Only when new features will be necessary, a proper solution will follow.
Up to then, I hope you enjoy, learn and discuss from the posts that will follow.
