Hello World!

For a long time I was wondering if I should create a blog in some platform or in a personal website. I couldn't find any good argument to spend time writing about something that probably a lot of people has already written.

Well, after have read some posts and watched some Youtube videos, I found 4 main arguments that changed my mind and I made me see the value of teaching to learn.

Knowledge retention

Have you ever tried to remember a concept you read somewhere or "learned" from a video? You feel like: I have seen it but I don't remember the details of it.
I have faced it many times. And I was always wondering how some people can retain a variety of detailed information and I can't.

As I said earlier, after some reading and watching, I learned that the people that retained detailed information were active learners whereas the ones that don't retain were passive learners.

The pyramid learning, first created by education specialist Edgar Dale, demonstrate seven methods of learning and the effectiveness of each method in terms of knowledge retention.

As you can see in the image, the passive side of the pyramid is where we commonly spend more time in our learning process, but the highest retention rate is in the active side, which also involves teaching.

Second brain

Although our brain can store lots of information, we know that it is a processor, not a hard drive. Sometimes we need to do a one-time configuration, like a Docker Compose file that won't be touched again soon. Since we are not doing it repeatedly, it signals our brain that the information "is not relevant".

Here is where the second brain theory comes in. Instead of trying to retain every single detail we learn and consume, we can save it in a place where we can fetch whenever we need. It allow us to safely forget information that would be hard and energy consuming to move it to our permanent memory.

It sharpens the communication

As software engineers, we often keep focused in the technical details and we forget the crucial role our communication plays. If we can't communicate well for non-tech stakeholders, the results of our work might not be what is expected by the real users that will use it daily.

Creating blog posts for an unknown public (tech or non-tech), forces us to deconstruct complex information into simple terms and clear pathways. This is achieved only when you deeply understand and internalize the concepts you are blogging about.

Learn in public

Every time we understand a new technology or concept, it still is not the end of that learning process. We have to practice it, build something, and as we saw in The Pyramid Learning, building and teaching are two of the best ways of information retention.

That's when questions start to be raised and the help of someone with more experience is crucial.

Publishing what you've learned can benefit others in the learning process of the same thing you are studying, and if eventually you say something wrong, you get mentored for free in the comments sections.

Conclusion

• Knowledge retention - teaching is the best way of learning.
• Second brain - create content allows us to safely forget information that we don't use very often.
• It sharpens the communication - teaching forces us to think more empathically and with more depth.
• Learn in public - it helps with knowledge retention, we can get mentored for free (in the comments section) and we can help others in the same learning process.

In this space, you can expect me creating posts about tutorials, cheatsheets, opinions, breaking down series and more. My intention here is always write in a way that I can understand, because my objective isn't seek for visualizations or likes, but have a local where the future me can rely on, based on all reasons I described in the post.

Thank you for reading until here. Share with me anything you'd like to say about this topic in the comments bellow.

See you in the next posts! 🚀