I have been thinking about having a blog for a while now but I can't really see what benefits it would give me? Seems like a lot of effort for something not terribly rewarding but maybe that is me being ill informed.
Publishing writing on a blog just makes this information public. I chose to do that since I benefit from the blogs of others, so I might as well make my learning and insights public, hopefully helping someone else too!
1. Opinions you talk about regularly, that would benefit from a well-structured argument you can link people to instead of typing from scratch every time
2. That one StackOverflow post you need every 2 years but you keep losing it because the search keywords are weird
I get 3 or 4 emails a day for jobs without having a blog, so I'm curious to understand how he can tell that his blog is what is drawing the attention.
Also, sometimes, my website is directly mentioned in the emails.
Like others have said, I write for my future self. I’ve been doing so for about 20 years. It’s extremely rewarding, for me, when someone emails me to say thank you. I’ve gotten emails from people saying I helped them lose 200 lbs (yes 200) or save $1000’s of dollars. That’s pretty rewarding.
For the curious, the person who lost weight was using a calorie tracker I built and wrote a blog post about. The person that saved money followed instructions on how to install old software on newer OS’s, saving them from buying a whole new embroidery machine (something I only did because my Mom needed help with her embroidery hobby).
To help myself, as another poster said, I record things I've learned, errors I have fixed, processes for e.g. setting up ssh securely or whatever.
To help others, most of the things that help me also help them. Every now and then I get a really weird error that no-one else seems to get and I have to solve it and then blog about it. Hopefully another 10,000 people don't have to go through the same pain.
At one point, I think I had about 200K viewson my blogspot blog but eventually I just came to hate the fact that they never seemed to update the site or fix any of the bugs on it so I went static and lost a tonne of SEO in the process but that will grow again!
Engineers are often introverts and many can struggle communicating easily the ideas that they understand entirely but which are complicated. Blogging is a good way to challenge that and force you to abstract something well enough to explain it.