The question that has been popping up in my head for about the last 2 to 3 years, should I start blogging about my learnings when it comes to being a developer or not?

Why should I do it?

If you browse around the different blog sites, from Medium to Dev.to obviously the answer you find on those pages will be yes, blogging does wonders for you:

• Improves your writing skills
• Improves your critical thinking
• Organizes your thoughts and learn
• Promote yourself to a wide audience

Why didn't I do it before?

In my head I also answered this question with yes, I should, many times. But I never followed on that answer to actually post and publish something. There are some out-dates pages on different file storage systems, from work related to personal posts etc, but nothing ever ended up on a blog site. Besides that, another question was always asked: where should I put my blogs? Should I write my own blogsite? which always followed with a long silence of indecision and sometimes creation of a starter app.

From my point of view, it always comes back to the same well-known scenario, the problem with finishing things. I start enthusiastically with writing the outlines of the blog posts, just as I'm doing at this moment (this of course will be somewhat invalid if you're reading this...) and leaving it for another day to finish the post and read it over, but this other day never occurs or way later in the future when the post is outdated and needs to be tweaked in order to be valuable.

Why will I do it this time?

At my job we have to come up with goals for each year how we want to develop ourselves and set targets that are obtainable in that year. As I mentioned before writing a blog has been in my mind for the last few years, it also has always been on the 'backlog' of my goals or as an underlying part of another goal. It always ended up not being picked for other goals. This year I'm going to change that and see if by adding an extra motivation (better end of the year assessment), I will go through with it and actually pick up blogging in order to see if the above statements about improving myself are true.

What will I blog about?

I find it always hard to pick a subject where you can blog about that might be interesting to people to read and find actually useful, so I attached it to another goal that I have for this year. We just started adopting Ansible at our work and it's a new technology for a lot of people so I decided to follow an online course to get to know it. After gathering this knowledge, I could have decided to use this for myself and share the link of the course with other people, but this way I wouldn't improve myself in the area that I think I need the biggest improvement, explaining things simple and understandable to other people. That also goes hand in hand with the quote: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.". Which accordingly to this post is falsely noted as an Einstein quote and was never said by him, however I still like it.

So, I've ended up challenging myself by creating an internal workshop for colleagues at work, but next to this I'll be creating a series of blogposts that will be aligned with the different steps in the workshop and hopefully help people in their search for Ansible knowledge. Besides the workshop steps I'll be doing a high-over post on the technology stack that I'll be using in the workshop, which be based on a Lit front-end with a NodeJS API as backend (still haven't decided on which server base to use) and the end result will be a site with build in analytics and database, which of course has been done multiple times already.

So here I am, basically answering the question I have been asking myself for the last few years, should and will I start blogging, yes, I'll give it a shot and I'll see where it will take me in the coming months.