The rubber duck: distinctive proxy for a sounding board. Points out gaps in one’s understanding. The listening duck imposes one requirement– you must hear yourself talk. And engineers are not famed for their listening abilities.
Writing on the other hand is a more cerebral activity – it focuses the brain and facilitates deep-dives. With a wiki in disarray, I switched to blogging with the same aim: ‘Let my blog be my rubber duck!’
Quite likely, a similar need motivated the proliferation of tech blogs.
Some random favorites:
* stackoverflow.com * petrikainulainen.net * Baeldung * vogella.com
* tomd.xyz * thepracticaldeveloper.com
Coursing the web, in search of answers to technical tribulations, one chances upon many blogs. Some are little more than slapdash acts of buggery – randomly plagiarized snippets – bereft of readability or value.
Good writing takes effort, thought and review. My initial contributions tended to read like acts of buggery. All’s not lost though. Writing is a process and one needs to discover one’s own groove. Some thoughts:
1. A WordPress site makes not a blog! You need a process. Find one, and make it your own!
2. Tools, Data Formats & Universality: Tools & formats will wax and wane. But like equality among people, some formats are more eternal than others. To that end, for the act of creation, I favor the most universal and lasting tool: the word processor. I prefer copying and pasting into my blog, as the least-fuss method by far. A local creation site and exporting a dump to your remote site, while elegant can be bothersome.
3. Organization: Admittedly more relevant for word-processors, but still.
I love the binders concept from OneNote for Windows (Notebook > Chapter > Page > Section).
The tool doesn’t lend itself to full-featured editing, formatting and organization like a word processor does though.
So I fell back to using a palette of styles (customised Headers Level 1 through 4) in concert with the Sidebar > Navigator > Headings to aid organization and have a proxy for Binders.
Heading 1: my Notebooks. Heading 2: Chapters. Heading 3: Pages (or blog articles). Heading 4: Sub-headings (or sections)). Et voila…
I find a Table of Contents at the top, un-helpful for navigation. But it can come in handy when you export the document to another format, dead-tree or epub.
4. Review, review, review: A blog post is not cast in stone. Revisit it and you might let slip a silent gasp. Learned something new? Rewrite, restructure, overhaul.