If I make an statistical study out of my friends and colleges who are developers, I can barely can say 10% of them are blogging. Is blogging a nightmare, a time waster, a cheap-seat show where bloggers act like significant people for them? I don’t know. I have one prediction: They don’t like writing. These people are tech savvy, they are not like my mother who doesn’t know how to publish on Web. They have sufficient writing capabilities their readers won’t complain about. They have weekends off and most of them are single.
I started my Internet fanaticism with writing in 1996-97. But releasing my first personal took another 10 years to happen, just a few years ago in 2006. Since I started to blog technically in a more personal area, my life changed fast. I have met dozens of people regardless of geological distances, interchanged great amount of knowledge, made friends, found people who can challenge me and found jobs. Besides these benefits, I have other reasons to blog technically:
1. It’s natural: You have passion for technology
You don’t have to have a reason. This should be very natural. If you are passionate about technology, you are also passionate about the trends in tech. Blogging is the top of the game since 2002-2003. Regretting the fashions won’t make you a cooler person. Early adoption gives a better impression. Running a blog and not making money out of it gives me one obvious signal: I’m passionate about what I’m doing, this is not just a job to earn my life.
2. Self promotion
Isn’t it obvious? Nowadays if you are not on the Web, you are nowhere. You will at least have a personal space to introduce yourself to the world of networks. It’s good because you can find others who are interested in similar technologies and are passionate for similar concepts.
3. Self improvement
How could writing improve my own abilities? It’s usually being asked. Being socially active is the best thing to find more people who can challenge your existing capabilities. I understand you were the smartest of your family, you had great marks at high school, was a top student at college and now a superstar employee. But due to the existence of your blog, everyday you have replies back to you from smarter people around to remind you are still a beginner. This is a great opportunity to see there are no limits and you are never done.
On the other hand, your blog serves as a timeline which captures your interests, technical knowledge and other capabilities. You can easily review yourself by taking a look at your older posts.
4. Sharing Knowledge
And obviously, sharing knowledge has its factor. It’s common for others to struggle where you went down. You may like to share an exceptional bug, a trick to make things work, a newly released product, methodologies, stories, experiences and reviews.
Blogging makes you a better developer. More people you meet, the better person you will be. Physically there are many constraints but an online representation of yours will fasten things. And as a blogger, I want to get that as an RSS feed! Now there is one thing I’m curious about. Do you blog or not? Why or why not?
Burcu Dogan 
well I do blog just for my own fun. and use it like my notepad for my software or hardware problems.
I write for keeping notes for myself so that I can search them on Google, not my hard drive 🙂
As far as I can tell, great development blogs are what illustrates the critical situations, shares analytical results such as metrics and tells real experiences. I would go for corporate blogs instead of personal ones.
> I write for keeping notes for myself so that I can search them on Google, not my hard
> drive
Kudos to Ustun! What better reason than ‘keeping found things found’ [1]? Google in general is good enough but sometimes you just need your way smaller personal search space, so that you can dig into it and find the goddamn thing for which you don’t remember any keywords 🙂
1- http://kftf.ischool.washington.edu/index.htm
Another point is: pure laziness.
In the old days we had Usenet (we still have an it is still much better for some technical treasures compared to flashy and non-sense stupid phpBB forums), then web forums. Now what do we do if we have a question? Simple: instead of trying to find someone just write your question at your blog and wait people from FriendFeed, Facebook, digg, reddit, etc. come and comment, provide directions, solutions, pointers, etc. All for free. Hmm, somebody said crowdsourcing? I call it exploiting human psychology (I suffer from the same weakness when I answer some technical questions of a blogger without asking for anything in return! 🙂
Right. +1. I think thats the only reason I publicly blog other than making announcments to help others. For self-promotion, there are mailing-lists, IRC, and comment boxes like this, where I can troll :P. And ofcourse when you write something with your name on it, you’ve to take the responsibility for that..and I don’t think geeks (most of them have weird fantasies) will like to do that, and…and you never know how many anonymous bloggers we have..;)
Anyways nice posting, keep typing…
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