0

I always wonder if there is any benefit of publishing programming/code related articles/tips either on ones own website or coding sites? I think it has a benefit that a programmer can have a record of his/her learning and refer them later, other than that?

As far as I can imagine, forum participation like stackoverflow offers a place for mutual learning and you may get business also, but what will be returned if I write solution for "How to show toggle drawer on Android activity"... etc.

Such writing will only attract junior coders who immediately need solutions for their current problems, they will read it and move on, I doubt this will be ever noticed by business person or senior developers.

But lot of programmers do that why? if keeping record of leanings is a reason there can be number of other ways.

duckduckgo
  • 135
  • 5
  • 2
    This will probably be closed as off-topic because it's mostly career advice. But the main benefit of writing something up is usually an increase in your own understanding. If someone else profits from it as well, that's a beneficial side effect. – Kilian Foth May 29 '15 at 11:12
  • 1
    @KilianFoth - This will probably be closed as off-topic because this site doesn't like questions that are of interest to programmers. – Scott Whitlock May 29 '15 at 11:28
  • 1
    Practice writing and communicating technical concepts. – Telastyn May 29 '15 at 11:47
  • well I agree @KilianFoth it will improves my understanding, when I actually I write it on paper I understand little better, but I suspect there is more to that! – duckduckgo May 29 '15 at 11:49

2 Answers2

2

Publicity Joel used his blog, joel-on-software to great effect in generating publicity for his company and product range. It also helped launch this range of Q&A websites.

There are some personal benefits too. The act of creating a clear, linear narrative to explain your thoughts, ideas and concepts will naturally help clarify your thinking and understanding of the subject.

The best articles are usually where someone is pushing the edges of what is possible. For example, one article I read was where lastfm.com were investigating what it took to handle one million connections to the same server.

Good luck

Michael Shaw
  • 9,935
  • 1
  • 24
  • 36
  • I can see two things, first writing on cutting edge technology and that definitely project you as a subject matter expert but when you talk about publicity I think it would be only top two in the town that would get their publicity monetized. – duckduckgo May 29 '15 at 11:54
2

As a programmer, you should be dealing a lot with different problems where the solution is not immediately visible and requires additional searching.

The next time you encounter the same problem, there are chances that you have absolutely no idea how you solved it in the past. So you do the searching again, wasting the same amount of time.

And the next time. And again, six months later.

In order to be more productive, you can start by taking notes. What was the problem? In which context? What was the solution? This takes time in short term, but is tremendously helpful in long term.

Such notes may be kept private. In this case, only you benefit from them. Or they can be public at practically no cost (other than taking care of spelling and presentation) by publishing them in a blog.

The benefit of making them public is not necessarily SEO or advertisement, since as you have noted, you are attracting only junior programmers who don't care about you or your blog, but exclusively about the solution. On the other hand, the major benefit is that you can then use Google to search through your own blog. If your notes are private, you should either spend a lot of time organizing them, or you'll waste your time searching for a note every time you have a problem.

Further reading: Google Search is great, or why should your internal documentation be public

There are few second-class benefits:

  1. By explaining the problem and the solution to others, you may discover things you weren't thinking about. This is essentially Rubber duck debugging applied in a scope larger than debugging per se.

  2. Trying to communicate clearly the problem and the solution is a good opportunity to enhance your communication abilities. How many times have you seen programmers asking: “Hey, I have a problem: there is a error with my code, well, I kinda don't know how to explain it, I was doing... well... I was writing code, and then the error appeared, and I don't know why, and don't know what to do...”?

  3. “Anything you say or do (on the internet) may be used against you in a job interview.” Interviewers do search about you; if you have a blog with high quality content, well written, well presented, it actually matters, even if the problems in this blog are actually basic. At least you have shown your communication skills and the fact that you are willing to share things with the community. Similarly, you may use your blog to back up your assertions during an interview.

    “I'm quite experienced in WCF. See, for the last four years, I had to manage three large projects which were heavily relying on WCF, those project being described here and here on my website, and I also published more than 80 blog posts about the different problems I encountered with WCF.”—is much more solid than:

    “I'm quite experienced in WCF. I worked on three large projects which were heavily relying on WCF, and I know how to handle many of WCF problems.”

Arseni Mourzenko
  • 135,365
  • On your third point, a public blog can backfire? as they would suspect you might share their code in public partly? Then about organizing notes, you maybe referring to an experienced programmer who already have the need of lot of documentation and wiki work. – duckduckgo May 29 '15 at 12:01
  • @AbhishekK: it depends on the content of your blog. If there are large parts of code which looks a lot like the code from your companies' project, then yes, it can backfire (and can lead to serious legal consequences anyway). If there are just short snippets of code, I don't see how this could be a problem for any sane interviewer. – Arseni Mourzenko May 29 '15 at 12:38
  • @AbhishekK: about your second question, I'm referring to any programmer, since even the most junior one can benefit from such notes. When I start learning a programming language or a new technology, I have such notes, which can look extremely dumb for anyone but juniors (like how do you search for text in a file in Python). – Arseni Mourzenko May 29 '15 at 12:41