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Why write a software blog

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I listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of blogs about software development. Over the years, time and again, many of them have adviced to start you own blog, for a variety or reasons.

Scott Hanselmann

I would encourage you all to blog more. Tweet less. Blogs are owned by you. They are easily found, easily linked to, and great conversations happen with great blog posts. The river of social media rushes on and those conversations are long forgotten. A great blog post is forever.

SimpleProgrammer

For most developers, your blog will be your main presence, or your home base on the web. Your blog is a chance to tell the world about what you are doing and show what you can do, and to completely control the message and image you present. This is an extremely powerful concept, because it allows you to shape the way potential and present customers and clients see you and can really increase your exposure.

Flavio Copes

You learn much faster. They say you never fully understand a topic until you are able to explain it. Blogging is a low barrier to explaining things.

G. Andrew Duthie

Its funny that you mention posting stuff so that you can go find it later. I’ll sometimes do that with stuff that I forgot I wrote. I’ll go search for some thing thats bothering me and in the first page is one of my blogposts thath I forgot that i wrote.

You Googled yourself!

Yeah, exactly. It’s like, wow! You know you’ve blogging for a while when that happens. You’ve had enought time to forget that you wrote it, and yet it’s still out there floating around.

I have not had to wait long to reap the rewards of starting my blog.

Last week, while working from home, I was attempting to log onto my computer in the office. After a few failed attempts, I emailed Pete who was in the office:

Email notification that my computer hard drive has failed
Computer says no

It turned out that one of the two hard drives had failed. It had the C:\ drive mounted on it. I normally install applications on the C drive and use the D drive for their supporting folders, temp folders and source code working folders. So I was thankfully left with all my helpful SQL scripts, a couple of uncommited code changes (tut-tut) and various downloaded files from the internet.

Visual Studio needed re-installing, and from previous experiences of upgrading Visual Studio, I knew to include some non-default extras, such as “Linq to SQL tools” for an older application required editing a .dbml file. However, I was not well versed in how I configured another older application to use React.js. I had only done this a few weeks previously, and that took some time to get just right. Thankfully, I created a blog post detailing every step. Instead of repeating those hours trying to incorporate React into the project, I got the chance to dogfood my own instructions.