Today at the local Python meetup, I repeated my little speech encouraging the other members to blog. They, in turn, suggested I write a blog post explaining what I just told them. It is entirely possible I have written this before in my 2.5 decods of recording my thoughts in web format, but maybe I still have something new to add.

When talking about software, esepcially that brand of software that is written for internal consumption at a company, I find it valuable to frame things in terms of “Me. Us. Them.” I might write something for my personal use. Later I dscover other people on my team can use it,too. Finally, I might find that it is worthwhile to make it availble to the larger organization. I think the same might be true about blogging.

The primary audience of my blog is Adam Young, the author. I write first and foremost as a programmers notebook. My career has called on me to work on a lot of different technologies. Often, I have to only touch these technologies for a biref time to accomplish a task, but I know there is a high lik;lihood that I will ahve to do that task again in the future. My blog is a personal professional notebook. I wrote a post once about how to talk to the FreeIPA server using Curl and jq. I have referred back to that page more times than I can count.

Writing a blog post helps me to clarify the problem and the solution in my head. I have dozens of posts in my drafts folder that didn’t get posted because, as I got half way through writing them, I realized I was missing something in the problem definition or the solution approach. I find that when a post goes on too long about details but does not seem to be getting closer to a solution, I am not at the point where I should be writing about it, I am at the point where I should be rethinking my approach.

The secondary audience for my blog is the people that I have mentored or aided over the years. Often they have to deal with the same issue that I have dealt with before. I often find myself giving the same advice over and over again. It is these lessons that I have found so valuable to share directly. Being able to give someone a link to a solution is satisfying, and so much more so when I was the person that wrote up that solution.My blog series on refactoring is a good example of that.

My blog serves as a record of my career that I can refer to when talking with a recruiter, another company, or looking for advancement in my own company. If I was interviewing about Linux kernel development, I could provide both links to my current work as well as work going as far back as chasing down the bug at Penguin.

I also have the hope that people that I have never met will find the solution the their problem in my notes. I have comments turned for my posts, and have occasionally been gratified to get feedback from someone how the post answered their question. This is an extension of the values that drive me to Open Source software development. I hope to pass on the how and the why of the decisions I have made as a coder to make it possible for other people to learn from my mistakes.

SO, my advice to my fellow Pythonistas today was to take the topics we were discussing and turn them in to articles. I felt that they would gain the same set of benefits that I have found from writing in this journal of mine for the past 25 years. Take care of yourself, and you can bring some fellows along for the adventure.