Hacker News Reader

Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

A great tip for content, when you learn something new, write a post about it. If it’s new to you it will be new to many others.

Doubly so if you couldn’t find a relevant post in the first place.

It’s also a huge benefit for yourself. I have referred to posts I’ve written on topics many times over in the future. E.g I spent hours configuring rspamd (https://blog.mailpace.com/blog/how-to-catch-spam-with-rspamd...) or setting up html modules (https://blog.mailpace.com/blog/using-html-modules/). Both are super niche topics that I struggle to recall the details of without my blog posts.

View on HN

And you never learn something so well as when you try to teach it. I can't count the number of times I've written something, paused, and wondered "well, does it really do that?" and gone off and investigated. When I return, I know more and the piece is better too (win-win!).

Even further, you don’t really know something until you can teach it

But you can know something but not perform it. The specific case I'm thinking of is coaching. You can know how to "bend it like Becks", but not actually be able to do it. I know that if I strike the ball with the outside of my boot on the outside of the ball, it will bend a certain way. But me doing that as a demonstration to the kids on my team is an entirely different thing.

yes, personal experience story.

This advice is the cause of so many low quality Medium posts that clog up my google searches and make it hard to find authoritative sources.

Frankly that seems more like a google search algorithm failure. I think the idea that people shouldn't produce content because you don't want to see it listed is more than a little silly.

>Frankly that seems more like a google search algorithm failure

it is, but it is also people writing crap all over the internet.

people writing crap all over is the internet

Both situations can happen.

I think that ideally you write about a topic you've grappled with and know it well at that moment. I've done this a number of times and am really happy that people comment it's been useful.

On the other hand I've also come across many low quality articles as well.

I used to do this (for about a week), but I'm in school and am constantly learning new things and ways of doing stuff and quickly got overwhelmed. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff and focus on worthwhile topics?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com