Ask HN: As a software developer, why do you think blogging is necessary?

I think writing things down as if I were to teach someone is the best way to fortify my memory. The more I write, the easier I can communicate at work.

I also don’t what fellow developers to go through the same struggles when solving a similar problem and fall for the same misleading information they may find online, I feel I should document my frustration and solutions.

Also for self promoting

I won't say it is necessary, but I like to blog about issues I run into which I could not find a well-documented solution to on the web. It is my way to help someone else in the future who runs into the same issues.

Besides that, it has also proven to be a valuable lead-generation tool for freelance work.

Blogging, but really marketing in general, thought me to ask "what do I want to say?" and "to whom am I talking?"

To an extreme this is also important in the code, because you can get the most clever algorithm or implementation or optimizatiton, but if your code should be maintained by someone else, you'd better keep it clear over clever. In short, write code that others can understand and modify.

More generally, with code we have comments, commit messages, readme and sometime even documentation. This is an example of how, at a certain point in time, we reviewed our README. From a confusing list of instructions, it's now a clear how to:

https://github.com/solokeys/solo/commit/bbc61d5743b45d62f7e2...

- What is this? A security key, with call to action (you can get one)

- First FAQ: Security

- First User / Use case: Hacker who wants to personalize his key

- Advanced User: Developer who wants to contribute

- More docs

- More bla bla

- Call to action again (you can get one)

As you can see this is the classical structure of any blog post / marketing page.

Because it's fun, mostly.

Also I have a lot of trouble actually remembering things and keeping my projects straight. By writing blog posts, even if I don't publish them, I can keep things straight.

I also needed to use picsofbread.com for something.

I think its necessary/useful as after 20 odd year programming ive lost so many notebooks, that blog posts help me remember what I need to know