Why I Blog

“It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can.

The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less.

The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten it.”

— CS Lewis, The Weight of Glory (quoted in Show Your Work!)

I loved that quote. It made a lot of sense.

It reminded me of something that happened almost fifteen years ago.

When I first discovered programming, I had somehow convinced myself that every cool developer needs to have a website. Somewhere to host whatever random thing they were building. So, after a bit of Googling, I bought a domain with my name.

I was excited. I was waiting for the page where I could upload my HTML files.

Silence.

There was no such page.

While I was trying to figure it out, I mentioned to one of my seniors that I had bought my own domain. His immediate question was where I was hosting it.

Ahhh.

Everything clicked.

I had obviously come across hosting before. I had just never connected the dots.

That question was important, not because it taught me DNS, nameservers or how the web worked. It didn’t.

It was simply the question I needed at that point.

Suddenly I had somewhere to look. Hosting led me to nameservers. Nameservers led me to DNS. One missing piece connected to another, and before long I had a mental model of how websites actually worked.

A couple of years later, I noticed something else.

Whenever I got stuck while programming, I no longer searched Stack Overflow first.

I searched my own GitHub repositories.

Obviously not because my code was better, but because it was my code. I knew why I had written it that way.

I think this blog started for the same reason.

It was simply a place to write things down so I wouldn’t have to figure them out all over again.

I found little to no value in capturing the conclusion. These are all one Google search away anyway. I wanted the process of how I arrived where I arrived.

I’m not claiming these are the best explanations to make you get there, but this is what made sense to me at that moment.

I went down this rabbit hole of thinking about why I blog because I was reading Show Your Work! It’s a quick 30 minute read, that I can easily recommend.

While I liked most of it, there was one quote in the book I strongly disagreed with:

“Work is never finished, only abandoned.”

— Paul Valéry (quoted in Show Your Work!)

I get the sentiment, but I would like to disagree.

I like to fantasize that perfection can be achieved.

ls is finished.

It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. I’d hate to wake up one morning to ls 2.0 with AI-assisted directory listings and a monthly subscription model.

Some software stuff reaches a state where it is complete, and that’s a good thing.

Anyway, I guess this is why I blog. I couldn’t fully articulate it until I read Show Your Work!.

Maybe writing isn’t your thing, and that’s fine. But I do think there’s something valuable about capturing your thoughts while you’re still figuring things out.

Some other quotes from the book that stuck with me.

“Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.” — Michael Lewis

“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you f***ing like something, like it.” — Dave Grohl

“If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.” — Kenneth Goldsmith

“A lot of people are so used to just seeing the outcome of work. They never see the side of the work you go through to produce the outcome.” — Michael Jackson

“‘The cat sat on the mat’ is not a story. ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is a story.” — John le Carré