Why I blog
Faye asked me this on the bus to Everest base camp. I started writing and posting only a month or two ago, and it was because I found all these great pieces on Hacker News, and they were from peoples' personal blogs. and on some of those blogs (e.g. Simon Willison's), the authors made extremely compelling arguments about how terrific it is to have a personal blog. Now that I've done it for a month or two, here are my arguments.
- It's a simple way to take ideas that I have and share them with the people I'd like to discuss them with. I wrote my last post because I was telling Elliott about the Javascript bookmark stuff and he was like cool send it to me. A blog post is a good way to share the thing itself and all my learnings about it.
- It gives me a concrete definition of what it means to finish a project, which means I'm more likely to finish the project. A project is not done until I've done a write up and posted it, and I would never do a write up for something that is incomplete in my mind. (That being said, sometimes I gotta adjust my expectations - see number 8 in How to Do Personal Projects)
- It means I have a living log of my thinking and learning, even if it's just a small part of it. I've written like 5 things and I already love going back and reading them.