为什么程序员应该写博客 Why all programmers should blog

There are some obvious reasons why you should start blogging when you are a programmer. Most of them also apply to everybody else:

• You share your knowledge. This is a benefit for all of us. If everybody would be blogging about all the little issues they had then a Google-Search would help us even more. I am sure nearly every problem in the world is already solved. It is just not written down.
• It’s a kind of self marketing. A potential employer can get a much better picture of your abilities than he could from CVs or references. When I hire somebody it is already a huge plus for him when he has a blog at all.
• Explaining things to other people is the best way to learn. You can only teach what you fully understand. This is at least as efficient as hands on experience.
• You might even make some money with blogging. There are several sites about this. If you are interested look here or here.

But the main reason is something else. Some years ago I read an article about software documentation. There was a lot of wisdom in it, but one phrase sticked to my brain:

Programming is doing something weird to your brain. When you write a piece of documentation right after a programming session the result is likely to be barely readable for human beings.

If that’s true then the opposite should work too.  Blogging teaches you to write for people, which is exactly what you should do in your code. Good code needs to be easy to understand to be easy to maintain. There are whole books about this like the famous Clean Code by Uncle Bob.

I think blogging does something weird to your brain, that makes your code better readable for human beings. So:

If you want to become a better programmer, start blogging!