After writing 3 posts, I think I am starting to get the hang of this blogging thing. I wanted to write about why I started blogging. I had been kicking around ideas for blogging in my head for quite some time, but I just wasn’t able to sit down and start it.

Taking Strengths Finder was the impetus I needed to start blogging. I took the test, and learned that my themes are input, deliberative, intellection, responsibility, and consistency. As I read through the strengths insights, something stuck out to me: three of my strengths mentioned the written word.

For example, the input theme includes the following insight: “You school yourself by reading, investigating, examining, experiencing, or receiving instruction in a subject.” As a follow-up to that, a suggested action was to share advice with others, or write about what I have learned. “Remember that you must be more than just a collector of information. … Make a point of identifying the facts and data that would be most valuable to others, and use this information to their advantage.”

I hope this blog is able to pull valuable information out of my own knowledge, and it is my hope that this information is of value to you.

The second reason I decided to jump in and start writing was because of an article I read on Coding Horror. How to Write Without Writing. Basically, writing and communication is the differentiator between a decent programmer, and an excellent programmer. Jeff Atwood’s article mentions two ways to train yourself to write: blogging, and cheating. Cheating in this case would be getting programmers to participate in Stack Overflow, where they learn to write by answering and asking questions.

I’ll try out blogging first. As I blog, my aim is to challenge myself to write longer, in-depth articles about things I have personally explored. I do not want to merely react to the latest tech topics. Jakob Nielsen’s article, Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, presents an excellent article about how to differentiate yourself by being proactive rather than reactive in your writing. We’ll see how this manifests myself in this blog.