As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been reading a book of John Sonmez “Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual”. Speaking about the programmer’s career, John said that leading a personal blog is an essential thing for a programmer, in case he wants to be successful. Well, a programmer can succeed without blogging, but it can make the road much easier and pleasant (though, it still requires much efforts, of course).
The main idea behind leading a blog is to build your own brand, which will be associated with your name or nickname. This can significantly simplify job searching in the future. If your name becomes a brand, then it starts to work on you. John mentioned an occasion when interviewer knew him, because of John’s blog. The interviewer read his blog before they met on the interview. It’s not necessary to say whether John got the offer, or not.
Long story short, keeping a blog is a good thing for your career. It has many advantages:
- you become more popular in the field you are writing about, it expands some extra opportunities;
- writing on a technical topic helps to understand the problem at a deeper level;
- you check yourself: whether you understand the topic yourself, or not;
- making your blog very popular you can earn some extra money by monetizing your audience
Because of an obvious limitation, it’s impossible to cram all the topics you want to address, so John offers an extended course about blogging. He offers two options regarding this topic:
- free course by e-mail
- paid course, full of valuable material. This is a comprehensive course about marketing yourself.
In addition I’d recommend to watch two pluralsight courses about blogging created by Pinal Dave:
There are too many points regarding smart blogging, so I’ll not explain them here. Just click on those hyperlinks above and listen to smart guys.
