What are the benefits of writing tech articles?

The benefits of writing tech articles are priceless. The most obvious are that you share your knowledge and others can benefit from it. But the question that drives people is: What’s in it for me? (a.k.a. WIIFM)

Professionalism

Writing tech blogs makes you more professional. Period. This benefit has two sides.

The first, when you are writing a blog post, you deep dive into a subject. You’d usually double check your conclusions. You’d sometimes ask for the advice of colleagues. The thing is – even by writing about something you are an expert of, you’ll learn something new. If it’s a new topic for you, you’d probably learn it pretty well. In either case – you become more proficient in the topic you write about. Professionalism. Period.

The second side to professionalism is that people see you as professional. You wrote about it hence you know it. When you are coming to an interview – if your interviewer is a serious person with a passion for the profession – your interviewer would have read your articles or at least browsed them. That means, you don’t come to the interview with a clean slate – the interviewer already saw a part of your knowledge – and liked it!

If you ever want to keep that edge of yours and always get that one-step-forward in your knowledge about a topic – write an article about the topic. If you also want to get an edge in your job interviews – spread and show off your knowledge.

That’s professionalism.

Document your solutions

Once you solve a problem – it feels great. Sometimes, I solve a problem and move on. The next time I run into this problem, I solve it faster. But this “faster” part is slower in proportion to the time passed since the last time I solved this problem.

The amount of times I got back to this old article about using webpack is countless. Getting back to it saved me hours of work. Same goes for other articles regarding problems I’ve solved.

The thing is – you struggle and you achieve something. That thing is a solution to the problem you struggled with. Future you will thank you for documenting this solution.

Get Awesome Offers

You can never know what you’re going to get by sharing your knowledge. After writing an article about Cesium and AngularJS back in 2015, I was invited to an awesome conference in Singapore. It’s a memory I cherish to this day. Ever since then, I get some offers for conferences or even job offers based on my blog’s content.

Help others

Now after we know writing a blog helps you, we can get back to the first point – it also helps others. And by helping others, you are helping yourself. It’s a magic cycle. That problem solution you documented? Future you is someone else you help. Developers will be thankful for making sure they retain their jobs by quickly solving the problem you solved just by reading your article. Sometimes, your solution can get a bit better, and someone reading your blog shares an improvement to your solution. Pure profit for everyone.