When I find myself learning something new about something basic or I find myself having a hard time googling for a solution, then I try to make it a point to write about those things.
@KevinMarquette
As I stated in Who I Am, I can wear many hats in a single day as part of a small, lean IT team. It is tempting to solve for a challenge or problem and simply move on without a second thought.
I started this blog for two reasons:
- To better understand things for myself
- To benefit others by contributing to the Internet knowledge base
To better understand things for myself
If you can‘t explain it simply, you don‘t understand it well enough.
Albert Einstein
Often times in IT, we can be seduced into following instructions or recommendations blindly without fully understanding what we are doing. We may do this to save time or because the matter at hand does not intrigue us. This lack of interest up front can come back to bite us later when we need to enable a system to do something new or troubleshoot a problem. How can we know what a system is capable of or fix a problem if we don’t attempt to understand it?
By blogging, I take time to sit down and explore; to ask and attempt to answer how and why. I know I have gained a good understanding about a concept or problem when I can communicate my knowledge clearly in written or video form.
Also, even when I think I know something, writing about it forces me to re-learn it, which gives me a deeper understanding of a concept than I had before I sat down to write about it.
To benefit others by contributing to the Internet knowledge base
Never memorize something that you can look up.
Albert Einstein
What did people do before the Internet when they didn’t know something?!? The Internet and search engines puts a world of information readily at our fingertips. For myself, a majority of continuous self-learning and troubleshooting has been conducted from a search box.
Just as there are numerous books written covering the same topics, we need numerous digital resources as well. People learn in different ways. A singular approach to explaining a concept will not resonate with everyone. Options are needed. And sometimes there isn’t a good resource out there yet, and if we’ve done the hard part of pioneering the solution, we should share it to provide the benefit of free knowledge that we can easily take for granted.
By blogging, I contribute explanations, How-tos, instructions, recommendations, problem resolutions, and discussion to this ever expanding ocean of knowledge.
