Blog Intro & Why you Should Start Your Own Blog

In browsing other people’s blogs, one thing that stuck out to me most was how common a tiny intro blog post was. These usually consist of a little fluffy introduction paragraph, and some lofty goals for the blog as a whole. Instead of joining in this cacophony, I will instead share my reasons for starting a blog in the hopes to convince you, the reader, to start your own.

To Share #

A base human need is to be seen and be heard. Starting a blog gives you the platform and all the framework necessary to fulfill that drive. Like journaling, it doesn’t even have to be for anyone else. It could act as a time capsule to your past self, to allow you to reflect on where you were and your thoughts from that time. I posit that beyond the benefits to others, it can benefit you as well.

To Crystallize #

This concept comes up in multiple different arenas of life, but the two most poignant are in preparing for a test and preparing for a presentation. If you’ve ever created a “cheat sheet” for a test, you’ll know that the cheat sheet itself is not the most useful part, but rather the act in creating it, the “journey”. In much the same way, by thoroughly preparing a presentation, you give yourself the best chance to not need the script or other preparatory materials in the final run-through.

This point was discussed by Dr. Alok Kanojia, where he describes the virtues of a regular writing practice¹, which helps one crystallize their thoughts, because the very action of writing forces you to convert your amorphous thoughts into a rigorous substance.

To Benefit Others #

With more and more help forums moving to closed sources like Discord, the amount of indexed information freely available on the web is sure to decrease. I posit that knowledge is power, and by sharing your experiences in a publicly indexed forum like a blog, you have the highest chance to help someone in need. Even beyond technology, you never know how your experiences can help those who search for it online, and that is truly the naive utopic vision of the internet from its infancy. At the very least, your work and knowledge will be scraped compressed into LLMs, depending on your robots.txt 🙃.