I haven’t done much blogging the past few months and I miss it terribly. After posting almost daily for five months as a requirement of my apprenticeship, I got a pass to only post a couple times a week… which I let slide to once a week… and then slid to just twice a month. I kept wanting to write posts and even have a list of topics to tackle, but because I felt crunched for time I kept pushing blogging down the priority list. First there was a client project on deadline, then there was a series of apprenticeship tasks I needed to finish, then the holidays started… it was easy to just kept putting it off. I definitely learned a lot during the past few months, but there is a noticeable difference in how I feel about my learning when I blog about it compared to when I don’t— and there is enough value in that difference that I’m making it a priority again.

Dave Hoover and Ade Oshineye’s Apprenticeship Patterns book made a huge impression on me during my introduction to the world of software craftsmanship, and I’m going to use it to frame why blogging is valuable.

Hitting the Patterns

A quick look through the Pattern List of the book reveals that blogging hits at least eight patterns in one fell swoop:

  • Confront Your Ignorance: Writing about a topic for public consumption always makes me confront the gaps in my knowledge- and in an effort to at least sound like I know what I’m talking about I take action to fill in the gaps.

  • Create Feedback Loops: Although my blog audience is relatively small I still often get a tweet, email or comment from someone at the office that provides valuable feedback on something I wrote.

  • Dig Deeper: While confronting my ignorance I always end up researching a little bit more on something I’m going to write, even if it’s just reading another article or two.

  • Expose Your Ignorance: Nothing exposes my ignorance like putting it out to the internet.

  • Kindred Spirits: The aforementioned emails, tweets and comments from coworkers on a post always have a positive effect. They often result in either someone reaching out to me to better understand the topic I wrote about or offering to help me better understand it.

  • Record What You Learn: There are a few posts (especially the technical ones) that I consistently go back to for reference. It also helps to be able to just Google ‘site:mikeebert.tumblr.com whatever-i’m-looking-up’ when I know that I wrote about something I want to review.

  • Unleash Your Enthusiasm: Nothing shows passion like the faceless posting of random thoughts on the internet with excessive punctuation and run-on-sentences, right?!?!?

Reflection:

The pattern I left out of the list above is the one that has affected me most since I stopped posting, and also the one that I think is most important to maintaining a learning mindset: Reflect As You Work.

Although many of my posts end up being technical in nature, I’ve also written several posts where I muse about how or why I’m learning something. These posts tend to be very personal and I always feel a little weird about publishing them. However, the act of publishing both the personal and technical posts force me to think about an audience— which then makes me think very differently about the topics rattling around inside my head.

Blogging forces me to reflect and then provide some structure to those thoughts. It’s the structure that makes the thoughts much more tangible, and I think it’s this “tangibility” to my learning that I’ve missed during the months I did little-to-no blogging. Although my rate of learning has continued to increase and I can think about all of the things I’ve done the past few months, that knowledge feels much more scattered and less concrete than when I blogged about the experiences.

Just Write

Sometimes when I think about all of these reasons to blog… and an audience… and deadlines… it gets a bit overwhelming and becomes just one more reason to de-prioritize writing. But after my unintended experiment of the past few months, I’ve learned that the value of regularly posting far outweighs whatever the cost is.